Gilles-William Goldnadel is a lawyer and essayist. Every week, he deciphers the news for FigaroVox.
Sunday January 15, at 8:30 a.m.,
Le Figaro
publishes a detailed article, in which it reports that a seven-year-old girl is in critical condition after a shooting on Saturday against a Catholic church in London, which injured five others.
The faithful had come to attend a mass in tribute to a mother and her daughter who died in November.
At 10 a.m., the public service channel France Info broadcasts a long report on an alleged
“new George Floyd case”
in distant Los Angeles but does not give a second to the tragic events in our nearest England.
At 1 p.m., France Inter devotes long minutes to demonstrations in Tel Aviv, but retains the same silence on the London drama.
Last Tuesday, the church of Saint-Louis-Roi was vandalized in Champagne-au-Mont-d'Or.
Father Martin Charcosset, parish priest, published in a press release:
“The objects present in the church: candles, books, vases, etc... were thrown on the ground.
The nativity scene installed in front of the altar was turned over and damaged.
The way of the cross and the paintings of the choir are essentially destroyed”.
Informed belatedly by social networks, I tweeted bitterly:
"My imagination is powerless to describe the media reaction if it had been a mosque or a synagogue"
.
Indeed, the agreed press remained silent.
Without the so-called "fachosphere", the parish communiqué would have remained a dead letter.
These crèches which cause a scandal when they are erected in town halls, make no noise when they fall to the ground.
The Stations of the Cross of silent Christians are also daily physical attacks, the most numerous in proportion after those of the Jews and well before those committed against Muslims.
The court of Bordeaux itself recognized that the litigious building had not been installed for a religious purpose.
Gilles William Goldnadel
Another more insidious persecution over which Christianity has the sad quasi-monopoly: judicial and administrative initiatives against not only Christmas cribs, but representations and vestiges of Catholicism, even if there is no religious intention.
This is how the administrative court of appeal of Bordeaux, confirming the decision of the administrative court of Poitiers, ordered the municipality of La Flotte-en Ré, on the island of the same name, the removal from the public domain of a statue of the Virgin Mary located in the middle of a crossroads in the aforementioned town.
It is the association La Libre-Pensée 17 which is at the origin of this decision, for having demanded the application of the 1905 law of separation of Church and State.
It is not my intention to discuss the legal merits of the decision.
Still there would be to write.
The first magistrate of the town, Jean-Paul Heraudeau evoked
"a ridiculous controversy"
, underlining the fact that the building was
"part of the historical heritage"
of Fleet-en-Ré.
I would have added of its cultural landscape.
The court of Bordeaux itself recognized that the litigious building had not been installed for a religious purpose, but offered by a family which only wished to celebrate the immense happiness that its child soldiers had returned from the war alive and in good health.
This is reminiscent in some of its aspects, the orderly destruction of the statue of Saint-Michel des Sables d'Olonne, doomed to the same disastrous fate despite a popular referendum overwhelmingly in favor of its conservation.
Let's put it bluntly: under the contempt for the old religion, the contempt for the old white man.
Gilles William Goldnadel
But what questions me much more is the attitude of these thinkers who are supposed to think freely.
I don't remember once seeing any of these militant secularists take legal action against a far more enterprising and new religion in our aging country.
I have never caught any of them attacking a public street prayer or an outfit with a religious connotation in a school in the Republic.
The 1905 law separating the Church from the State was voted in pain when the first dealt too much with the businesses of the second.
I do not have the impression that it is the religion of Christ which is today the first danger which threatens both the State and secularism.
Reason why, it seems obvious that our so-called free thinkers are the first prisoners of
deadly ideology of time.
This secular ideology which, for example, cannot conceive without crying blasphemy that a genocide of Christians could have been perpetrated in Vendée.
This ideology of love for otherness adores the distant but abhors the next.
It spares with obsequious awe the searching religion of "the Other" but despises the helpless followers of the old religion.
She spreads her gall everywhere.
A recent example among a thousand.
Daniel Cohn-Bendit was this week the host of the program “C à vous” on France 5. In a consensual atmosphere, he was able without contradiction to explain that France suffered cruelly from a shortage of immigration.
Even though this does not seem to be the majority opinion of the population.
It is, he explained without being denied, that there is a “conspiracy”, of which the chief plotters having for name Ciotti and Le Pen denigrate the migratory phenomenon.
Finally and above all came this piece of bravery which I submit to the sagacity of my reader:
"Between us, if the French identity was only the people of the RN and Zemmour, we would have to flee the country, you are no longer staying there, it's terrible"
.
Under the cobblestones the beach, and under that ugly cobblestone, aversion for old people and indulgence for newcomers.
Let's put it bluntly: under the contempt for the old religion, the contempt for the old white man.