The reason for the attack seems perfectly clear -- an attack on Christians at mass by Muslim jihadists hardly needs parsing, does it? -- as indeed the French prime minister, Manuel Valls, observed when he said on Twitter that the 'barbaric' attack was a blow to Catholics and the whole of France. 'We will stand together,' he said. How, exactly? Yet most of the reports at this point, led by the French interior minister, Pierre-Henry Brandet, say the motivation for the hostage taking was 'unclear'... but it's all too clear, surely?

It's been quite a week, hasn't it, for the Islamist enemy within? There was the attempted abduction -- or murder -- of a British serviceman outside a Norfolk airbase and two out of three homicidal attacks in Germany were conducted by Islamist refugees. In France, we just keep counting; this murder of a priest was, unlike the Bastille Day murders, targeted and sectarian, but it's one more for IS to take credit for. If the object of the exercise is to make Europeans feel that they are safe nowhere; not on a public boulevard, not in a train, not in a church, well, I suppose it's working. And there is absolutely nothing we can do to guard against random attacks in public spaces. It always feels a bit bogus to say that we're not going to give way to terrorism every time we go to a wretched shopping mall but that's about the size of it; simply by going on holiday to the south of France, we can brag about not being cowed. Actually, I have every intention of going to Paris, but I'd be lying if I said it was to make a stand against terrorism; it's pure sybaritism. Je Suis Parisienne, folks.

All we can do is be as honest as possible about the nature and scale of the problem. In Michel Houellebecq's novel, Submission, about a Muslim Brotherhood takeover of the French government (liberals and conservatives agreed this would be preferable to a National Front government), the interestingly prescient element was the non-reporting by television and papers of outbreaks of violence prior to the change of government (Twitter didn't really feature in this novel). And that rings true. We've already got self-censorship when it comes to reporting attacks by Muslim refugees (the gun attack by a German-Iranian patently fell into a different category) in Germany and Scandinavia, and an almost comical reluctance anywhere in Europe to identify Islamist attacks as such -- until IS takes credit for them, even the work of freelances. Plainly we have to guard against language that would demonise an entire community, but within that reasonable limit, we must require both politicians and public service broadcasters to talk plainly. And when Muslim extremists slit the throat of a priest in his own church, we're looking at religiously motivated murder, entirely of a piece with the same religiously motivated murder of Christians and others being carried out in the Middle East. Shall we say so?

*****

"Je suis Father Jacques Hamel"

By Jean Duchesne
FIRST THINGS
http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2016/07/je-suis-father-jacques-hamel
July 26, 2016

What has just happened at Saint-Étienne du Rouvray can only arouse horror and even anger at a hatred which is as cruelly cowardly as it is stupidly suicidal. After the terrorist attacks in France and in Germany, it is permissible to observe that this time these lunatics have not killed at random.

Until now (and with the exception of one attempt, fortunately thwarted, against a church in Ivry), the fanatics had attacked aspects of the flattering self-image that we "citizens" have of ourselves: the iconoclastic insolence of Charlie Hebdo, the pagan cult of sport at the French National Stadium, the carefree pleasure of the Bataclan and the boho outdoor cafes of the Eleventh Arrondissement in Paris, the 14th of July fireworks in Nice celebrating a Revolution that has promoted great ideals but also the guillotine ...

This, today, was something else altogether. The target of this revenge was not the West in general, nor its complacent and egotistical prosperity, which can seem insulting to the penniless inhabitants of the world beyond. The target of this revenge was the root of the West, the West's living source, even when it is unremembered--namely Christianity, in the time and the place where, tacitly but invincibly, it becomes most explicitly and intensely real: the celebration of the Mass.

The question that therefore arises is how far the French (and others) will identify with the victims--an old priest, savagely slain, and a handful of believers and sisters. Will many proclaim "Je suis Father Jacques Hamel," just as all (or nearly) insisted "Je suis Charlie"? Or will most think it sufficient to point out that it is not good to murder anyone, and perhaps go on from there to defend freedom of conscience and even of worship? Something may already have shifted. What went viral on social media after the truck-killings in the Promenade des Anglais was not some defensive slogan, but "Pray for Nice." The problem is not political or cultural, but spiritual.

Christians can only be shocked and disgusted, like everyone else who deserves to be called a civilized human being. But if they should be more shaken than anyone else, it is not because they are now entitled to think that their Eucharistic assemblies are in the crosshairs, that they are vulnerable to homicidal impulses stimulated by a delirious propaganda. It is because they find themselves confronted, in a way no one can desire or foresee, with the mystery of evil in its most naked brutality, namely the unbearable enigma that love is not loved, as revealed by the cross on which the Lord Son of God accepted to be nailed.

And so we continue to go to Mass, whatever our fears, to receive the love which conquers hatred by not rendering hatred in return. And, because we wish to love those who believe themselves to be our enemies and those who do not care, the doors of our churches remain open.

Jean Duchesne is a special advisor to the Catholic Archbishop of Paris