On Motorcycle, European Pilgrims Race Toward God

Porcaro Journal


On Motorcycle, European Pilgrims Race Toward God
Cyril Folliot/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The festival of the Madonna of the Bikers attracted nearly 10,000 motorcyclists from across Europe last weekend to the soggy wheat fields of Porcaro.

By SCOTT SAYARE
Published: August 17, 2010
PORCARO, France — The inhabitants of Brittany, on Europe’s rain-soaked western edge, are said to love the church as much as they love a party. Which perhaps makes this tiny Breton village a less improbable locale for the wholly improbable happening it hosts each year.

The New York Times
Porcaro proudly calls itself the “French bikers’ capital.”

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A biker praying at an open-air chapel in Porcaro, France. The annual festival includes two Masses and a blessing of the bikes.

The festival of the Madonna of the Bikers, which organizers promote as the largest motorcycle “pilgrimage” in France — there are few aspirants to the title — attracted nearly 10,000 motorcyclists from across Europe last weekend to the soggy wheat fields of Porcaro, population 650. It was an unlikely mix of what Roman Catholic Bretons call the “sacred and profane”; many came to pray, many to carouse, a surprising number to do both.
There were priests and incense and holy water and much solemnity and prayer, but also AC/DC and studded leather, body piercings and tattoos and, beginning well before noon and lasting well into the night, the consumption of prodigious quantities of alcohol.
“No one should leave here without having gotten what he really wanted out of it,” intoned the Rev. Jean-François Audrain, presiding over an open-air Sunday Mass. Draped in white gilded vestments, he addressed a crowd of thousands of bikers and local faithful, gathered in a rolling field behind Porcaro’s 19th-century stone church. Later, he joined four fellow priests in sprinkling holy water on thousands of rumbling Harleys, Hondas, Ducatis and Kawasakis, filing past one by one.
Held here annually on the occasion of the Assumption, the Catholic celebration of the Virgin Mary’s ascent to heaven, the Madonna of the Bikers is meant as a religious gathering open to all comers, organizers say, and an opportunity for the church to penetrate the biker flock. The program features two Masses, the blessing of the bikes, and a 45-mile “pilgrimage” ride through the fields and dark forests of central Brittany, in addition to several non-denominational rock concerts and ample supplies of beer and wine.
Begun in 1979 by a local abbot as a pilgrimage ride for himself and 37 friends, the event has since grown into a sprawling festival — this year the concerts, held in a field outside town, lasted until 4 a.m. Sunday — and what is viewed by many as one of France’s premier motorcycle events, religious or otherwise.
Unlike Lourdes and other better known French pilgrimage sites, Porcaro draws a sizable contingent of nonbelievers, a phenomenon perhaps all the more surprising given the widespread distrust of organized religion in France, where the separation of church and state is codified in an almost religious brand of secularism. Brittany, though, has long enjoyed a less standoffish relationship to Christianity than has much of the rest of France, and Catholicism is viewed by many here simply as part of the region’s social fabric.
“I’m not so into the church,” said a biker who called himself Snake. (He brushed off a visitor’s request for his full name, explaining, “Everyone knows me, in any case.”) Still, he tried to have his bike blessed last year, he said, but the attending priest balked at the “666” etched on it, with its Satanist overtones.
Others said they had come to Porcaro for a spiritual experience.
Pascal Letartre, 60, had come from Chartres, he said, “to say a prayer for our fallen fellow bikers.” This was the second year he and his wife, Bernadette, had come to Porcaro, though last year, she chimed in with a laugh, “It was to drink!”
Porcaro has come to define itself by the festival — the town calls itself the “French bikers’ capital” — and residents say they actually enjoy the characters it draws. The gathering is largely financed by souvenir sales overseen by a local association and staffed almost exclusively by volunteers from the village and the surrounding communities. Many homeowners allow bikers to pitch tents on their lawns during the festival.
The two-day event injects about $500,000 into the local economy each year, said Porcaro’s mayor, Pierre Hamery. Last weekend, much of that sum appeared to be destined for Porcaro’s two bars, the village’s only commercial establishments.
“The Madonna brings in all our profits for the year,” said Marine Perrichot, 18, whose mother owns and operates the bar Le Wheeling (“The Wheelie,” in French). This year, the bar stayed open all night Saturday and on into Sunday.
“There are never too many problems,” Ms. Perrichot said, recalling with a laugh when a gentleman rode his motorcycle into the ground-level barroom several years ago. “We can’t complain,” she said. “They’re all adorable.”
Despite all the imbibing, the gathering in Porcaro began as and remains a religious event, with the backing of the Catholic Church.
“The essential thing for me, as a priest — as a biker-priest — is to show this community that God is close to them,” said Father Audrain, who rides a BMW F 800 ST and has helped coordinate the Madonna of the Bikers since 2007. “My work, in the first place, is about making God seem all right, and making the church seem all right.”
“It’s tricky,” he noted.
The brand of Catholicism embraced by the Bretons is well suited to the hard-living motorcycle world, said Father Audrain. Drawing on the traditions of the hedonistic Celts who once inhabited the region, Breton Catholicism holds that all human activity, with the exception of sin, is in the service of God, he said.
“Partying doesn’t bother me,” said Father Audrain, a slim, athletic man with an endearing lisp, and no teetotaler himself. Still, he acknowledged, as much as the partying might draw nonbelieving bikers here, it also keeps a fair number from the Mass on the event’s second morning.
“There aren’t so many of them that show up,” he said, “because they have to sober up from the night before.”
As Father Audrain conducted his service Sunday morning, Lenaïck Flamant hurried toward a nearby coffee stand.
“It was hard this morning,” admitted Ms. Flamant, 47, dressed in heavy black and white leather. She had gone to sleep at 4 or 5, she said, but awoke at 9, to be sure to have her Yamaha blessed. She had brushed her teeth, and was confident the priests would smell no liquor on her breath.
“I took a breathalyzer before I got on my bike,” she said. “It was close, but I made it.”
A version of this article appeared in print on August 18, 2010, on page A4 of the New York edition.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/18/world/europe/18motorcycle.html?emc=tnt&tntemail0=y