A terrorist attack and a massacre in a newspaper in Paris. The following day, to the south of the city, a related individual shoots down a female police officer. On the very next day, a hostage situation in the outskirts of the Paris airport to the north of the city. Then, hours later, another hostage situation in the Porte de Vincennes region of Paris, shutting down completely the beltway (périphérique) around the city.
Just yesterday we said that, "such events will become each time more common in the upcoming decades as frightening wars of religion of unknown violence unfold by installments throughout the cherished cities and fields of that Europe all Christians love so much." At this very moment, experts on French television and radio networks are openly using the word "guerre" (war) about the moment, and one declares openly: "Nous y sommes... Ce n'est qu'un début." (We've reached it...this is just the beginning.)
The French Wars of Religion in the 16th century, when Protestant noble and bourgeois families broke the Catholic unity of the Kingdom, were very rarely affairs of battles and sieges, though these also happened, and were extremely important. They were most frequently, however, affairs of isolated attacks, terrorist events, fortified rebel urban units, and in this sense these bizarre wars of Islam that are about to begin are not a novelty in Western European history. At the time, however, the Catholic majority was never in doubt, neither was the strong faith of most of the population in Christ and His Church, supported by Traditional priests, the Traditional Mass in its various Latin uses, and the Traditional Sacraments. Today, there is no spiritual backbone of any sort to prevent the full effects of fear and terror in a population that has mostly abandoned any love for Our Lord.
Is there a solution for the crisis beginning now and that may take several bloody decades to reach a conclusion? Certainly, John Paul II already gave France the recipe to survive in the years ahead:
"Behold that before my eyes is France, mother of saints throughout so many generations and so many centuries! Oh, how much do I wish that they all return in this our century, and in this our generation." (Notre-Dame de Paris, May 30, 1980)
"Allow me... to ask of you:France, Eldest Daughter of the Church, are you faithful to the promises of your baptism?Allow me to ask you:France, Daughter of the Church and educator of peoples, are you faithful, for the good of man, to the alliance with the Eternal Wisdom?Forgive me for this question. I asked it as the priest does at the moment of baptism. I asked it out of solicitude for the Church, of which I am the first rock and the first servant, and for the love of man, whose final grandeur is in God, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost." (Address, Bourget Airfield, June, 1, 1980)
And that, the Most Blessed Trinity, is today, as then, the only permanent answer to the future anxieties and troubles of France and Europe. May the Church end her lukewarmness, that is rejected by Christ, and take up her responsibilities.
