"The flames that ravaged Paris' Notre Dame riveted the world because it is a legendary, architectural masterpiece at the center of France's capital and much of its political history. For those who track religious-freedom threats, the fire itself may be less of a surprise than that it apparently was started by accident.
"Hundreds of other French churches are being quietly burned or damaged — in deliberate attacks.
"Ellen Fantini, who directs the watchdog Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination Against Christians in Europe, told me in an email that church attacks in France have been relentless for the past four years....
"We also see this happening to churches in Northern Cyprus, Egypt, northern Nigeria and other places where certain members of society are hostile to a small and weak Christian community and the government itself is indifferent.....
"The overwhelming majority of French churches attacked are Catholic, but some have been Protestant and Eastern Orthodox....
"many times, the culprits are a variety of extremists enraged by the identities and teachings that the churches symbolize....
"Ironically, they are targeting churches, when, as a 2018 Pew survey found, only 18% of the French attend church even monthly, and the churches' influence over French politics and culture is diminishing to the vanishing point....
"Islamist terrorists and other radicalized Muslims have led France's most deadly attacks against Christians: the Islamists who slit the throat of Father Jacques Hamelin Normandy's Saint-Etienne du Rouvray while he celebrated morning Mass in 2016 and those who conducted the ISIS-inspired terrorist attack on Strasbourg's Christmas Market in December, which killed five and wounded a dozen. These perpetrators were shot by police. Arrests occurred in the cases of radicalized Muslims who showed up at the Cathedral Saint-Vincent de Chalon-sur-Saône and the 13th-century Cathedral of Notre Dame in Reims, threatening to blow them up, as well as in the case of a Syrian woman, wearing a Venetian face mask, who entered Sainte-Marie-Madeleine and took an ax to the holy water font, a side altar bas relief and a statue, where she placed a Quran — all in front of terrified congregants.
"In September 2016, a Moroccan Muslim man was arrested reportedly for being a serial church arsonist, setting fires to three churches in Millau. Outside Paris, police arrested an Algerian Muslim man suspected of planning an attack on 'one or two churches,' as he was reportedly advised to do by a contact in Syria.
"Numerous unidentified vandals, acting with clear anti-Catholic animus, have aimed at what Catholics hold most sacred, the consecrated Hosts.....
"Church leaders themselves seem reluctant to discuss the attacks....
"I was reminded of what veteran Church scholar George Weigel observed a decade ago, 'Too many European bishops have internalized a sense of their own irrelevance and the Church's'....
"No graffiti or claim of responsibility has surfaced to suggest that the Notre Dame fire was anything but an accident. And while the example of Notre Dame may not rekindle appreciation for France's Christian patrimony, it should stir a demand for the government to protect it."
"Hundreds of other French churches are being quietly burned or damaged — in deliberate attacks.
"Ellen Fantini, who directs the watchdog Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination Against Christians in Europe, told me in an email that church attacks in France have been relentless for the past four years....
"We also see this happening to churches in Northern Cyprus, Egypt, northern Nigeria and other places where certain members of society are hostile to a small and weak Christian community and the government itself is indifferent.....
"The overwhelming majority of French churches attacked are Catholic, but some have been Protestant and Eastern Orthodox....
"many times, the culprits are a variety of extremists enraged by the identities and teachings that the churches symbolize....
"Ironically, they are targeting churches, when, as a 2018 Pew survey found, only 18% of the French attend church even monthly, and the churches' influence over French politics and culture is diminishing to the vanishing point....
"Islamist terrorists and other radicalized Muslims have led France's most deadly attacks against Christians: the Islamists who slit the throat of Father Jacques Hamelin Normandy's Saint-Etienne du Rouvray while he celebrated morning Mass in 2016 and those who conducted the ISIS-inspired terrorist attack on Strasbourg's Christmas Market in December, which killed five and wounded a dozen. These perpetrators were shot by police. Arrests occurred in the cases of radicalized Muslims who showed up at the Cathedral Saint-Vincent de Chalon-sur-Saône and the 13th-century Cathedral of Notre Dame in Reims, threatening to blow them up, as well as in the case of a Syrian woman, wearing a Venetian face mask, who entered Sainte-Marie-Madeleine and took an ax to the holy water font, a side altar bas relief and a statue, where she placed a Quran — all in front of terrified congregants.
"In September 2016, a Moroccan Muslim man was arrested reportedly for being a serial church arsonist, setting fires to three churches in Millau. Outside Paris, police arrested an Algerian Muslim man suspected of planning an attack on 'one or two churches,' as he was reportedly advised to do by a contact in Syria.
"Numerous unidentified vandals, acting with clear anti-Catholic animus, have aimed at what Catholics hold most sacred, the consecrated Hosts.....
"Church leaders themselves seem reluctant to discuss the attacks....
"I was reminded of what veteran Church scholar George Weigel observed a decade ago, 'Too many European bishops have internalized a sense of their own irrelevance and the Church's'....
"No graffiti or claim of responsibility has surfaced to suggest that the Notre Dame fire was anything but an accident. And while the example of Notre Dame may not rekindle appreciation for France's Christian patrimony, it should stir a demand for the government to protect it."
No comments:
Post a Comment