France’s epidemic of church attacks | Tom Colsy
Only a week before the iconic staple building of the Île de la Cité in Paris was engulfed by flames in April 2019- with its fate uncertain for the duration of the blaze as fears of a total structural collapse were held- an article in the Times was published documenting the growing prevalence in spates of unprovoked desecration, vandalism and violence at France’s Catholic holy places. These include but are by no means limited to; a fire deliberately ignited earlier that year at the church of Saint-Sulpice, human excrement smeared on a cross and on the walls of the Notre-Dame-des-Enfants church in Nîmes, and significant vandalism at the Basilica of Saint-Denis- where France’s past monarchs are almost all buried.
Today, another incident has been added to the list as the Saint-Pierre-et-Saint-Paul cathedral in Nantes burns. The fire was initiated in three different locations. Once again it is confidently suspected to be arson.
In order to understand France’s epidemic of church attacks, the French context plays a key role. Notre-Dame (de Paris) had itself been a target in notable foiled terror plots shortly prior. In 2016, Muslim women Ines Madani (19), Sara Hervouet (23), and Amel Sakou (39) were brought before court over a plot to detonate a car packed with explosives beside the famous cathedral in its car park. During the raid in which they were arrested, Hervouet stabbed a police officer while Mardani was shot in the leg after attempting to charge another. Predictably, all three were later convicted and sentenced.
According to the BBC, Hervouet herself had prior relationships with French jihadists Larossi Abballa, who killed a police officer and his wife near Paris that June, and Adel Kermiche, one of two men who murdered an elderly Catholic priest in northern France. The aforementioned Catholic priest was defenceless 84 year old Father Jacques Hamel, murdered in his church- Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray- near Rouen. He was warmly accounted by local nuns as a man “who loved all people, regardless of religion” and “a faithful priest, a priest who loved everybody, who loved much”.
In fact, later the same year as these events, in 2016, it was reported that Islamist terror plots had become so prevalent that the French state was foiling them ‘daily’ and that over 10,000 citizens had been identified as ‘high risk’. Many such plots were targeted at Christian holy sites and churches. Sid Ahmed Ghlam’s foiled plans to conduct mass shootings at churches during Sunday mass being a prime example of this. There is a problem in France. And Christians are expected to look the other way and ignore it.
Indeed, in the aftermath of Notre-Dame’s internationally attention-grabbing calamity, investigators were quick to declare the fire to have been an accident, stating it was most likely to have been caused by either ‘a cigarette’ or a ‘short circuit’ in the electrical system. Soon after, media outlets were equally fast to tout the line that prosecutors had found there was ‘no evidence’ of criminal damage, which was itself dubious as even a poorly placed cigarette could suggest malintent.
Yet even at the time, given the circumstances churches across the nation had been facing for the last five years, high profile politicians on the French scene such as centre-right leader Nicolas Dupont-Aignan found such explanations too much to stomach, and was among many to declare his doubt publicly. The actual cause of such a fire may never be known, but such doubt, based on speculation, is certainly not without reason or backing.
While anyone who denies that there exists a radical anti-Christian sentiment lurking and growing in an increasingly sectarian France is expressing incredulity, the recent tragedy in Nantes may well turn out to be the fault of secularist thugs rather than Islamists. Such individuals are the apparent culprits of the incomplete hacking down of the large iron cross that towered atop a cliff at Pic Saint-Loup. Though, considering the beauty of the cathedral in Nantes, the culprits are surely unlikely to come from outside of these two factions, as anyone with even the slightest semblance of respect for Christianity or French heritage would have immense distaste at the destruction of such beauty.
The interior of Saint-Pierre-et-Saint-Paul, Nantes.
Regardless of who the culprits are, and whether people struggle to accept the recurrence of coincidental accidents all occurring in a France in which religious and race relations are fast deteriorating (aptly illustrated by the Albanian-Algerian-Chechen wars in Dijon last month), arson and vandalism attacks on Catholic holy places are not isolated occurrences. Further incidents include:
The vandalism of Notre-Dame (de Dijon) in February 2019.
The arson attack at Notre-Dame de Grâce in Eyguières, Provence on Easter Sunday 2019.
The desecrating of the tabernacle and five-time robbing of the Saint-Pierre church in Montluçon, Auvergne between 2018-2019.
The burning to the ground of Saint-Jacques church in Grenoble, Rhone-Alpes in January 2019.
The arson attack at the Saint-Pierre du Matroi church in Orléans, with “Allahu akbar'' graffitied on its surviving walls in July 2018.
The vandalism of the holy font and placing of the Quran by the chopped-off arm of a broken statue by a Syrian woman with an axe at the church of Sainte-Marie-Madeleine, Vézelay in April 2017.
And so on. Ellen Fantini, executive director of the Vienna-based Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination against Christians in Europe called France the worst country in Europe for Christians. That certainly appears to be the case. Is this illuminating a grim reality of multiculturalism? Whatever the case, whether the solution being in cathedrals and churches requiring greater protection, this cannot continue.
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