Marc Eynaud is a journalist and author of Who wants Catholics?, published by Artège.
FIGAROVOX. - In the aftermath of the Easter holidays, significant damage was committed in the Sainte-Madeleine church in Angers in Maine-et-Loire, statues were decapitated in particular. Are these isolated acts or are they, on the contrary, recurring?
Marc EYNAUD.
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It is necessary to add to this litany, another desecration in the church of Trélazé on March 30th… The days and the desecrations follow one another and look alike and are unfortunately anything but isolated.
If the motivations and profiles of the profaners vary, they strike by their regularity in a more or less complicit silence of the authorities whether they are civil or ecclesial.
What is striking in the degradations committed at the Sainte-Madeleine church is the violence of the attack which suggests the act of a madman or a possessed person.
The priest of the Angevin parish also heavily insisted on the verb "decapitate" which almost suggests a particularly hateful ritual.
We are really faced with a desecration that comes closest to an act of hate, heinous, gratuitous and
Are Catholics more affected than other religions by these acts of desecration?
The figures from the Ministry of the Interior quoted in your columns are final.
Catholics are by far the main targets of anti-religious hatred.
Between looting, desecration, fires, physical attacks against priests or even the faithful, media attacks also which contribute to legitimizing concrete violent acts in some way... All of this contributes to the same more or less avowed or conscious objective: eradicate Christianity.
Basically, it is probably the only convergence of struggles that is worth: removing the church from the center of the village.
How do you explain it? Are the French at war with their roots?
No doubt we can find part of the explanation in the fact that it is the religion that has the most places of worship on French territory, places that are often open and unsupervised since they are less and less frequented, but it would be an illusion to think that the issue will be solved by closing the buildings or installing security systems.
The hatred that is unleashed against Catholics is mixed with an equally ancient and pernicious hatred: self-hatred coupled with the psychotic will to eradicate from our societies everything that has built it.
Christianity and the history of France are so intertwined that when you attack one, you inevitably attack the other.
It's all the magnitude of
"The moral prohibition that protected our churches has been shattered"
, the Archbishop of Rouen had whispered to me a year earlier.
Catholics have always had to face adversaries, heresies or schisms, but in this first third of the 21st century, they are forced to face an adversary who has been encountered more, proportionally, since the fall of Rome: the uneducated barbarian who understands nothing of the sacred and nothing of the Christian faith.
This is what was striking in the face of the controversy born of the "twerk" initiated by the young tiktokeur Benjamin Ledig in a Parisian church.
A desire to smear what we are unable to understand, not because we are too stupid for that, but because we are totally ignorant of the most elementary bases of the Catholic catechism for the simple reason that this heritage has suffered, like the others, a violent break in transmission.
Faced with these attacks, we see young people mobilizing in a very positive way.
There are countless initiatives to reduce chapels or associations such as SOS Calvaires which are renovating these monuments which line our departmental roads and our paths.
Marc Eynaud
How do Catholics experience these attacks?
The faithful whose church has been desecrated generally come out shocked, of course.
But there is, in the reactions aroused, an extension of this generational divide which appeared gaping at the time of the Covid epidemic and the closing of churches: an older generation which still believes itself to be in the majority and has not realized that ' by dint of wanting to blend into society, the church did not go far from dissolution.
“You were so afraid of being the last Christians that you will be the last Marxists”
, launched the brilliant Maurice Clavel to this generation in the 1970s.
And then you have a young generation that knows it is a minority and therefore wants to defend more vociferously what it has received, a young generation that has seen the seemingly definitive divorce between Christianity and modern society.
A young generation which expects its prelates to be leaders and not managers and which, sorry to repeat it, expects more “the Cossacks and the Holy Spirit” with Léon Bloy than a “synod on synodality”.
Faced with these attacks, we see young people mobilizing in a very positive way.
There are countless initiatives to reduce chapels or associations such as SOS Calvaires which are renovating these monuments which line our departmental roads and our paths.
In short,
Catholics are beginning to understand that if the stones are the casket that protects the real treasure "invisible to the eyes", Catholicism is above all an incarnate religion.
One does not descend into the catacombs for fear of fighting a battle.