French Catholic pilgrims hiking to Chartres, France / Adobe Stock
In a July 26 report for The Free Press, journalist Rod Dreher offers an eyewitness look at a striking religious revival among young French Catholics.
His account followed 20,000 mostly young pilgrims in June as they journeyed on foot from Paris to Chartres — a demanding, 62-mile trek marked by prayer, chanting, and devotion to traditional Catholic worship.
The annual pilgrimage, now in its 43rd year, is organized by the Association Notre-Dame de Chrétienté, which remains faithful to both the Holy See and the Latin Mass. Dreher observed that despite media caricatures and internal Church tensions over traditionalism, the pilgrims were anything but hardened ideologues.
“Far from the scowling, bitter reactionaries of Pope Francis’s caricature — or the anti-traditionalists imagined by the Society of Saint Pius — these young pilgrims seem ebullient, friendly, and, well, completely normal,” he wrote.
Many came for a sense of connection to something enduring.
“People just want to find something outside of their day-to-day life,” Cyriaque, a 25-year-old pilgrim, said. They’re looking for transcendence.”
Most of the pilgrims are French, but not all. Marching under a US flag, 25-year-old Matthew Witzane explained why he joined an American chapter.
“I think we’re on the crest of a new wave,” he told Dreher. “We’re seeing lots of young Catholic communities popping up all across North America.”
The pilgrimage blends the rigor of medieval tradition with the clarity many young Catholics say they are missing in modern Church life.
“Tradition is the only safe future we have,” said Anna, a 24-year-old from Vienna. “What are you going to build your life on, if not God?”
Dreher noted that this hunger for stability is particularly poignant in France, once revered as the “eldest daughter of the Church” for its early embrace of Christianity, yet now counted among Europe’s most secular societies.
Today, France ranks among the most secular nations in Europe, with a majority of its population no longer professing belief in God. Public life has been shaped by a deep-rooted anticlericalism dating back to the Revolution, solidified by the 1905 law establishing laïcité, the nation’s model of strict church-state separation.
“Is France now witnessing a rebirth of Catholicism among its youth?” Dreher asked.
Sociologist Maria-Katrina Cortez, cited by Dreher, noted that only 23% of French adults aged 18 to 24 identify as Catholic — but those who do are far more devout than older generations.
“This isn’t a mass revival, numerically speaking: It is a qualitative rather than quantitative resurgence,” she said.
Cortez explained that traditionalist parishes in France are more likely to offer vibrant community life and more intellectually grounded homilies. For young people worn out by a fragmented digital culture, that structure provides rest and clarity.
“Many young adults who are mentally exhausted by the modern world find in these places a form of rest, rootedness, order, and mercy,” she said.
The pilgrims, Dreher noted, carried banners of saints, many of whom are “obscure and intensely local,” alongside flags of their home countries. Inside the cathedral of Chartres, many sat or stood for the closing Latin Mass; others listened from outside, following the liturgy via video broadcast.
After three days of walking, the pilgrims tended to be tired but joyful.
“My feet are in pain, but my heart feels good,” said Alexandre Gaubert, 22.
Others described a sense of communal prayer, of faith strengthened by unity.
“I think prayer is carried more strongly to heaven when we are praying together,” said Louis, 18, from Lorraine.
“This is the future of the church, no doubt about it,” said Slovakian pilgrim Juraj Šúst, who walked with his teenage son.
Dreher said that while some may dismiss these young Catholics as nostalgic idealists, their motivation runs deeper. He argued they are responding not to a fantasy of the past but to the spiritual confusion of the present — a world, he writes, that lacks “form, structure, and meaning,” shaped by generations that abandoned those very foundations.
According to Dreher, the young pilgrims see Chartres as “a beacon of what the world might be again.”
