The outcry over Hamel’s killing lasted only as long as it took for the ink on the page the following day to dry. And Pope Francis, after Hamel’s murder, said: “If I speak of Islamic violence I must also speak of Catholic violence.” He really said that.
by Giulio Meotti
Imagine the scene: a Mass celebrated in an ancient church in Normandy, three parishioners, two nuns and an elderly priest. Six people in all. And two terrorists armed with knives who interrupt the rite and slit the priest’s throat on the altar.
It was nothing new.
1996: seven French monks massacred in Algeria.
2006: an Orthodox priest beheaded in Iraq.
But on 26 July 2016 this horrible ritual was consummated in the heart of European Christendom.
Danièle is a nun in the church of Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray, a banlieue of Rouen.
On 26 July, Father Jacques Hamel had packed his bags to leave on holiday with his family. But as usual he was celebrating the 9 a.m. Mass in the church of Saint-Étienne.
The nun clearly remembers the two jihadists bursting in from the sacristy, just after Hamel had dismissed the congregation: “Go in peace.” The two young men entered shouting in Arabic.
“I said to myself: ‘That’s it, it’s over for us,’” the nun tells Le Figaro. The killers chanted “Allahu Akbar,” yelling that “Christians are the enemies of Muslims.” One thrusts a camera into the hands of Guy Coponet, 87, and forces him to film; the other rushes at Father Jacques: “What are you doing? Calm down!” The priest is forced to his knees, resists, receives a first knife blow, then a second, fatal one. He cries: “Get away, Satan!”
The nun flees and stops a lorry: “Quick, call the police.” The terrorists were killed shortly afterwards.
Far from the concert halls of the Bataclan, far from the packed Promenade des Anglais in Nice, terrorism had chosen the nave of a little stone church that dominates a working-class area, where Danièle had been for several years.
Saint-Étienne, a working-class banlieue parish, de-Christianised, dominated first by the Communist Party, then by Islam: “today it is a Muslim neighbourhood,” Sister Danièle confides, pointing to the veiled women and the men in qamis.
Guy Coponet was also a witness and a victim of the murder.
After Communion the sacristy door opens. “They stab me in the arm, in the back and cut my throat,” the parishioner recounts. “I press on my neck where I feel the blood flowing.” The terrorists pour their propaganda over the faithful. Guy’s wife recalls: “They question us, especially Sister Hélène. ‘Do you know the Qur’an?’”
The weekly La Vie published the messages the terrorists had exchanged before striking. “Is a synagogue good?” one asks. “Everything’s fine,” his boss replies from Syria. But he does not want to “focus on the Jews,” because “people immediately think of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Take a knife, go into a church, cut off two or three heads. No mercy for these people.”
The emotion and the scandal over Hamel’s killing lasted only as long as it took for the ink on the page the following day to dry.
Pope Francis, after Hamel’s murder, said: “If I speak of Islamic violence I must also speak of Catholic violence.”
What? He actually said that???
It is hard to understand why, in the church of Santa Maria in Trastevere in Rome, the Qur’an was heard at the ceremony for Father Hamel. As if the very text from which the executioners drew strength could magically become an instrument of reconciliation. It is a form of reverse magic: one believes that by touching the wound with the same weapon that produced it one can heal it.
But one does not heal. One humiliates the dead man.
It is hard to understand why, in Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray, Bishop Duval gave a piece of land adjoining one of the churches in Hamel’s town for the construction of a mosque. It was not generosity. It was a surrender. A surrender disguised as dialogue. Because dialogue, when one of the two interlocutors still holds the knife, is not dialogue: it is coercion under threat.
Two years ago the cathedral of Rouen itself caught fire-the city of the cathedral Monet painted thirty times. The city of the “hundred steeples” and the place where Joan of Arc was burned alive in the Hundred Years’ War.
Then they also burned the synagogue of Rouen.
The nun who the terrorists had asked whether she knew the Qur’an told them she appreciated the verses that speak of peace.
In the terrorists’ brilliant reply to the nun lies the whole moral of this strange story: “Peace is exactly what we want.”