Two years ago today we witnessed with horror the Notre-Dame fire.
My post HERE
Two years on, the work on the cathedral continues.
I read today that the side chapels are being cleaned.
EWTN posted a short video of some of the work:
?VIDEO | Two years ago today, a fire destroyed a large part of the famous Notre Dame Cathedral. French President Emmanuel Macron visited the construction site and inspected the progress of the rebuilding project to give hope to the French that a completion day will arrive soon. pic.twitter.com/HaEDq9Qbjn
— EWTN News (@EWTNews) April 15, 2021
And to this day, we still have no official conclusion as to the cause of the fire. All we have are the same hasty assurances that were being repeated, even as the flames were still roaring, that this was certainly not arson.
It’s a tragic fact: Catholic Churches in France are being desecrated and burned almost daily in France. Who are the culprits? Islamists? Communist anarchists, now called “yellow coats”? Masons? They are seldom caught so it’s anyone’s guess, but all are cases of deliberate acts of vandalism and arson.
But what is impossible to believe – however hard Pres. Macron tries to hoodwink us – that only this one magnificent Cathedral, so emblematic of the great history of the old Catholic France, was set on fire by accident!
Written a month after the Notre Dame Cathedral fire this article’s title is pessimistic but the statistics are interesting.
France Is Dead as a Cohesive Judeo-Christian Nation by Michel Gurfinkiel
“Regarding France in 2019, it can no longer be denied that a momentous and hazardous transformation, a “Great Switch”, is in the making. Jerome Fourquet, an analyst for the very mainstream Ifop polling institute, garnered in a book released last February, L’Archipel francais (The French Archipelago), a wide range of figures in this respect.
“The spectacular decline of Catholicism has been France’s main religious phenomenon over the past fifty years,” Fourquet writes in his opening chapter. In 1961, Catholicism was the social norm and baptism a near universal practice: 92 per cent of the French were then baptised. Today, 80 per cent of the present population is still reported as baptised. However, this is largely an optical illusion resulting from higher life expectancy: 46 per cent of the present French population were more than 50 years old in 2012, hence born before 1961. The figures are quite different when it comes to younger citizens: the younger the bracket, the fewer are baptised.
“While 79 per cent of middle-aged citizens (35-49 years old) were baptised in 2012, the proportion fell to 70 per cent among the young adults (25-34) and to 65 per cent among the very young adults (18-25). Moreover, only 58 per cent of the baptised French were considering baptising their own children, and an even lower proportion actually did it. Among the children aged 0 to 7, “48.8 out of 100 were baptised in 1999, 40 out of 100 baptised in 2005, 34 in 2010, and 30 in 2015.”
“In 1961, 38 per cent of baptised Catholics said they attended Mass “every Sunday” or “as often as possible”. In 2012, just 7 per cent attended Mass.
“This combined trend – an exit of older priests and a shortage of new priests – accelerated over the years, reducing France’s Catholic parish clergy from 25,203 priests in 1990 to 11,908 in 2015. Half of what is left of the clergy today are old and beyond the age of retirement.”
https://www.meforum.org/58603/france-is-dead
Three days ago Israel National News reported:
“Relatives of a Paris woman who was killed by her neighbor while he spewed anti-Semitic slurs and was high on marijuana have lost their final appeal to have the killer tried.
“In its decision Wednesday, the Court of Cassation’s Supreme Court of Appeals upheld rulings by lower tribunals that Kobili Traore cannot stand trial in the 2017 killing of Sarah Halimi because he was too high on marijuana to be criminally responsible for his actions.”
The website of the Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination against Christians in Europe:
https://www.intoleranceagainstchristians.eu/
The Observatory has a map page of incidents, though incomplete due to under-reporting. For France see this site which also has a map (“Cartes Des Actes”) of incidents:
https://www.christianophobie.fr/
Gatestone Institute from January 2020:
“The research shows (see appendices below) that roughly 3,000 Christian churches, schools, cemeteries and monuments were vandalized, looted or defaced in Europe during 2019 — which is on track to becoming a record year for anti-Christian sacrilege on the continent.
“Violence against Christian sites is most widespread in France, where churches, schools, cemeteries and monuments are being vandalized, desecrated and burned at an average rate of three per day, according to government statistics. In Germany, attacks against Christian churches are occurring at an average rate of two per day, according to police blotters.”
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15366/europe-anti-christian-attacks
Some progress is being made in Europe with burqa bans and restricting the foreign funding of mosques.
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/299736
France’s predicament is also a result of growing lawlessness and terrorist street gangs loyal to or at least cooperating with a belligerent and pagan Leftist political religion (as in the U.S. with street gangs such as the so-called “Antifa” and so-called “BLM”).
“On January 25 in Pantin, a suburb of Paris, on February 4 in Carcassonne in the south of France, and on February 13 in Poissy in Yvelines, organized groups of “young people” — according to the established media vocabulary to avoid any ethnic designation — lured police forces into their neighborhoods to ambush them. To the shouts of “Kill them; kill them all”, police patrols were attacked with explosives and pyrotechnic devices used as urban guerrilla weapons. Each time, videos of the attack were broadcast on social networks.
“Between March 17 and May 5, 2020, French police were subjected to 79 ambushes, based on statistics from the Ministry of the Interior published by Le Figaro. In October 2020, Le Figaro counted at least ten attacks on police precincts since the beginning of the year, and more than 85 incidents of “violence against persons in positions of public authority” were recorded daily throughout the country by the national police, according to Le Monde. In January, the statistical services of the Ministry of the Interior recorded 2,288 such “kill them all” incidents, based on information from police reports.
“A war is being waged against the police in France, but this war is never named. On the contrary, many members of the media, rap singers, actors, experts and others are joining delinquents and offenders to claim that an intrinsically racist police force is active in a war against Blacks and Arabs living in France.”
…
“If this French style of defunding the police succeeds, the so-called anti-racism ideology, set up in the mid-1980s by the left, will prove to be the most effective tool for dismantling states since Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. If the police cannot investigate or protect the public because officers are afraid of being called racists, the security of all citizens is in danger.”
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17105/france-war-against-police