1889
A traveller came up the road one Christmas Eve and wrote down what he found: at four in the afternoon, the church at the end of a long street hung with bunting, two thousand people waiting to receive him with shouts. He returned before midnight to find both naves nearly full, and none of the noise he had expected. “Silently and stealthily as ghosts the Christians, draped in their long white cloths, entered the church, glided barefoot over the flagstones, and knelt down on the ground, the pale light of a large candelabrum falling upon their gleaming features.” They knelt around a wax Infant Jesus, his arms stretched out towards them, and the two naves sang in turn, each led by its own catechist. Then Communion, and everyone rose: “all distinctions were lost sight of at the Holy Table; they were all the children of God, of one heart, one soul.” One altar for all: what the foundation stone had promised in 1855, a stranger saw happen at the rail.
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What this source establishes
The arrival, in the visitor's own words: four in the afternoon, the wide facade at the end of a long street decked with bunting, some two thousand people who received them with shouts of welcome. The same page goes on to the midnight Mass. ⚠ WINDOWED, and it must stay windowed: two sentences after the arrival the writer explains the two naves by the division and names the groups, which is the parish's excluded history.