CELESTIAL BANQUET: MESSIAEN'S SACRED MUSIC IN CONTEXT by AIDAN NICHOLS O.P. J e ne puis pas imaginer un instant que quiconque mette rna foi en doute. C' est vraiment toute rna vie, rna motivation du compositeur. I cannot imagine how anyone even for a moment could put my faith in question. The truth is that it is my whole life, my motive for being a composer.' H ow Catholic was the France of Olivier Messiaen, the culture in which he was formed? During the middle decades of his life,statistical sociologists performed that trick for which they are famous, and established by the collection and analysis of data things everyone knew anyway. The regions where Catholicism had retained its impact were: the West (Brittany, Mayenne, the Vendee), the North (the Pas de Calais and French Flanders), the East (Alsace-Lorraine), and a swathe of territory sweeping round from Savoy to the Basque Country by way of the southern part of the Massif Central. Here the overwhelming majority of people were baptized, had been married and would be buried in church, and saw to the first or 'solemn' communion of their children. A high proportion among them were confessed and communicated every Easter and attended their parish churches each Sunday for Mass. These were the 'faithful', les fideles: but then within their number there was also the smaller but extremely significant constituency of les divots, the 'devout': those who attended the other liturgical offices of the Church and ran the multifarious ecclesiastical societies at local, regional or national level - every- thing from youth clubs, les patronages, and pious sodalities for devotional and charitable purposes, to agencies raising funds to 173