The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

actually crowned by Innocent III in Rome, and given the title of Catolico. The crusade, he maintained, was due to the longstanding feud between the north and south of France. It was, he cried, race antagonism, which was evident during the course of the crusade, for many of the orthodox southerners helped the heretics to drive back the invaders, and the heretics in many cases deposited their money and treasures with the priests and bishops.
    The argument between the two sides waxed furious and I was truly amazed to discover that today in Provence, bled white, and trampled upon in the Second Great War by modern Cimbrians and Teutons, the youth were ready to argue passionately about a war that had taken place seven hundred years ago. The Albigensian war remains a perpetual memory graven in the minds of the people living between the Rhone and the Garonne, and we find its incidents woven into the pattern of the rhapsodical cantefable, which the folk have created of their own history, wherein Marius becomes the husband of Mary Magdalen and Julius Caesar joins hands with St. Martha, St. Honorât and St. Gilles.
    Montpellier was an important halting-place on the road to Santiago at the end of the eleventh century when William V and his wife Ermisindis were lords of the city. They founded a hospital of St. James and a charitable Institute of the Holy Ghost which in the thirteenth century had branch houses in Marseilles and other places in southern France, for helping the poor and the sick. There was also in Montpellier in those days the Hospital of St. Eloy, which looked after pilgrims, orphans and the sick.
    On arriving at Narbonne we went first to the Cathedral of St. Just of the twelfth to thirteenth centuries, which has an impressive choir 131 feet high. Nearby is the Hotel de Ville, which used to be the palace of the Archbishop. In one of its three ancient towers King Louis XIII signed the death warrant of his twenty-two-year-old favourite, the Marquis de Cinq Mars.

THE PRIEST-WORKERS

    After saying farewell to my travelling companion, Canta l’Epistola, I set out on my next stage, Carcassonne, with two young priests, friends of his who were travelling to Toulouse. After Narbonne the scenery changed, and we entered a deep valley, which opens as it were a natural path towards the Atlantic. The countless races that moved along from the Mediterranean to the Ocean were forced to move within that valley, for if they tried to veer to the north of the valley they would have found themselves caught in the deep gorges of the Montagne Noire, which is the southernmost portion of the Cévennes, or if they had veered south they would have lost themselves in the equally impossible gorges of the Corbiéres, which are the north-eastern spurs of the Pyrenees. The scenery has a peculiar charm of colour, for the black mountain is a dark slate-like rock and the Corbiéres, in contrast are of white limestone. On this occasion we were given a lift in a lorry laden with barrels of wine and we stopped at the little taverns on the way, Montredon, Villedaigne, Lézignan-Corbiéres, Douzeus, Capendu and finally Carcassonne.
    At all our stops in the towns there were messages and bargainings, for the lorry-driver, in addition to delivering his barrels, had to take messages from all and sundry for the towns on the way. My two companions were very earnest young priests. The older was entirely scholarly and laconic in speech. The other was an ‘exalté’; he told me more in a few hours about the position of the Church in France today than I had learnt in years.
    “We Catholics have been in a bad way since the end of the war,” he said.
    “But surely,” I replied, “this is true all over Europe. Even in the nineteenth century, in the days of Ozanam the poor districts of the industrial cities were completely godless and many never knew the inside of a church or met a priest. There has been in France as in other countries a dechristianizing process going on for a long time.”
    “In our days, monsieur, the great new social class has not lost God: they have never had Him. This in spite of the wonderful work that has been done by Catholic social societies before the Second World War. Even during the war, in 1943, an attempt was made by priests interested in the workers Christian Youth Movement, who presented to Cardinal Suhard, the Archbishop of Paris, a memorandum, urging the initiation of a campaign for Christianity among the workers. The