-810x500.jpg)
(LifeSiteNews) — Six years after the gruesome slaughter of Father Jacques Hamel by two radical Muslims in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray, near Rouen in Normandy, an official memorial service was held on July 26th in the small suburban town in the presence of local Bishop Dominique Lebrun and local authorities.
Several dozen dignitaries and faithful, including the slain priest’s sister Roseline, walked in procession down the street where the elderly Father Hamel himself so often walked toward the parish church to celebrate Mass.
It was the first official homage since the trial earlier this year of three men who were found guilty of having acted as an “association of terrorist criminals” with the two terrorists who were killed by police at the end of the attack on July 26, 2016. The three convicted criminals received prison sentences of seven, eight and 13 years, respectively (of a maximum penalty of 30 years). They insisted during the trial that while “radicalized,” they had no knowledge of the planned attack itself and asked for forgiveness.
This aspect of the case was present during the memorial service, with both Bishop Lebrun and the civil authorities – the local mayor, a former National Assembly member and the prefect representing the French government – stressing that “peace” has returned thanks to the closure of the trial. Mayor Joachim Moyse stated during the “republican homage:” “Our town works daily in view of peaceful and emancipating alterity.” While the meaning of this is obscure, it would seem that what is being touted is amiable coexistence between the native French population and the increasing presence of Muslim immigrants in and around Rouen.
Pierre-André Durand, the regional prefect, said the terrorists had “fundamentally lost” their battle despite their “incredibly savage crime:” It “could have destroyed the national concord,” he said, but instead “the path to forgiveness” had been found.
Father Hamel’s killing took place six months after the Islamic terrorist attack that killed 130 people in the Bataclan theater in Paris, and only days after a truck driven by an Islamic terrorist left 86 others dead and 458 injured on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice during the fireworks display for France’s national holiday on July 14, 2016.
Peace and pardon are beautiful and necessary words, and surely it is commendable that Catholics should love their enemies and try to see the good in them, but, in fact, the mollifying discourse of those in charge of protecting the population and not of turning the other cheek merely draws a veil over the tense situation created by the indiscriminate welcome of zealous Islamic migrants.
Only during the recent long weekend of July 14, six people fell victim to knife attacks in provincial towns in the four corners of France: Angers, Amiens, Metz, Lorio-sur-Drôme and Sérignan, mostly on the part of African migrants, some illegal. Julien Odoul, a member of the Rassemblement National party of Marine Le Pen, stated at the National Assembly last week that there are now 120 daily knife attacks in France as violence is growing inexorably. Most are not “terrorist:” they are motivated by a look, a refused cigarette or some other futile motive, but they are surely a sign of deep cultural change.
Only last Sunday, two days before the memorial service for Father Hamel, another attack took place in the main parish church of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, in the western suburbs of Paris. Evening Mass was being celebrated when a man burst into the church swearing and accusing the parishioners of being “racist” in not letting him say Islamic prayers. He shouted, “Satan is within me! We must sacrifice some of you!” A member of the congregation tried to calm the intruder but was hit violently when the latter gave him a head-butt. The aggressor was pinned down by a dozen parishioners and handed over to police.
Then on Wednesday, July 28, a refugee from Afghanistan attacked two passers-by with a knife in the provincial town of Le Mans while shouting words in Arabic, but this was “not a terrorist attack,” according to the local prosecutor.
No wonder that France should be commemorating the “martyrdom” of Father Hamel with particular fervor this year. While the cause for his beatification is underway, and as locally some 600 written homilies of the priest are being patiently transcribed in the procedure, the place of his death is becoming a pilgrims’ rallying place. The steady trickle of Catholics who come to pray in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray has reached such proportions that a fundraiser was launched by Bishop Lebrun last Tuesday in order to renew buildings where the intention is to receive pilgrims.
Bishop Lebrun also celebrated a Holy Mass on Tuesday in the church where Father Hamel’s throat was slit by two men shouting “Allah Akhbar.” Investigations were to show, five years later, that they had been “activated” by a contact of the Islamic State in Syria, French national Rachid Kassim, who texted to them that they should enter the sanctuary during Mass to kill: “Take a knife, go into a church, create a bloodbath, you can even cut off two or three heads, it’s okay, it’s over.”
On Tuesday, the feast of St. Ann, the same readings were read as those that were the last Father Hamel ever heard; the lectures that “prepared him for death,” said Lebrun, including the parable of the wheat and the chaff. Lebrun called on the congregation to “avoid binary logic.” Referring to this year’s trial, he said, “I was struck by the search for the truth that tells us that life is not so simple. There are no ‘goodies and baddies.’ In every man, there is the possibility to become better. That is ultimately what the judges must determine when they decide following the dictates of their conscience. Of course, they convicted, but of course we hope with them that those who were convicted can become better.”
This is at the least a misguided vision of human justice, that is called to mete out punishment for criminal acts in order to compensate for the evil that hurts victims, to dissuade other potential evil-doers from taking action and to protect society from individuals who have been proved harmful and dangerous. Becoming better lies on another subjective and individual plane and does not erase the need for atonement.
The horrible slaying of Father Hamel was the killing of a man out of hatred for the Christian faith, and as such it should have been penally condemned with regard for the aggravating circumstance of “racism” – the French blanket crime that covers all crimes and delicts motivated by racial, ethnic, and religious reasons.
The mainstream French media hardly raised this point, instead repeating words of “peace” that sound rather out of key in the current situation.
On the political side, two facts should be remembered if justice is to be done to the memory of Father Hamel.
The first is that one of the terrorists, who killed Hamel but also seriously wounded a sister who was at the Father’s last Mass and forced another parishioner who also received grave wounds to film the scene, was known to the authorities as a radical Muslim. Adel Kermiche, 19, was on the list of individuals who represent “a threat to the security of the State,” known as “fichés S.” Kermiche, had twice tried to travel to Syria in 2015 under his brother’s identity in order to join ISIS. He even reached Turkey, where the local police arrested him and extradited him to Switzerland, where he was later handed over to the French authorities and listed as a potential terrorist. He was under surveillance and had been forced to wear an electronic bracelet by an anti-terrorist judge – which did not prevent him from organizing a terrorist crime and committing murder on a frail old priest.
The second is that the other terrorist, Abdel Malik Petitjean, also 19 years old, bore a native French surname. He had been adopted when he was five or six months old by Franck Petitjean, a native Frenchman who had no links at all with the radicalized Muslim world. Yet in this family context, “Malik,” as he was known, was drawn to ISIS and to hatred of the Christian faith.
It was Malik Petitjean – who had also traveled to Turkey and who had been inscribed as a “fiché S” upon being returned to France – who knifed Father Hamel 18 times on that fateful day in July 2016.
Many provincial churches in France’s towns and villages are tragically empty as religious practice goes down and down; it is in this void that Islam is flourishing in “the eldest daughter of the Church.”
