I wrote this message to the Archbishop of Rouen Mgr Dominique Lebrun, his clergy and faithful on their Facebook page and their website e-mail address:
Je suis prêtre de The Anglican Catholic Church et j’habite à Hautot Saint Sulpice, donc dans le territoire de votre archidiocèse. De la part de mon évêque Damien Mead, de tous nos prêtres et nos fidèles en Angleterre, j’exprime notre sympathie et solidarité avec votre communauté et avec la paroisse de Saint Etienne de Rouvray. J’ai déjà offert la Messe, non pas pour le père Jacques mais pour l’honorer comme un nouveau martyr, tué par haine de la foi et du Christ. Je suis de tout cœur avec vous tous. Père Anthony Chadwick.
Translation: I am a priest of the Anglican Catholic Church and I live in Hautot Saint Sulpice in the territory of your Archdiocese. On behalf of my Bishop Damien Mead, of all our priests and faithful in England, I express our sympathy and solidarity with your community and with the parish of Saint Etienne de Rouvray. I have already offered Mass not for Father Jacques but to honour him as a new Martyr, killed in hatred of the faith and Christ. I am with you all. Father Anthony Chadwick.
If I receive any response from them, I will post it here.
Many thanks for this, Father: I am sure that it reflects the thoughts and prayer of all of us, priests and lay, in the Anglican Catholic Church around the world, ‘a travers le monde’, as well as those in the Diocese of the UK……
What has happened in France is what Christians, Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestants, living in Muslim countries face everyday. We have been so secluded and removed from this reality for so long that we have forgotten.
The USA has never had such a problem. Islam did not get any further than Spain and the frontier of Austria is its various attempts to invade Europe. They are trying to invade via mass and uncontrolled immigration plus the radicalisation of young Muslims already residing in European countries. The present line of the various political powers can’t go on for much longer before a popular insurrection happens in countries like Germany, France and the UK.
We can’t fight back with handguns. We are in Europe and gun ownership is strictly regulated, though I do believe that there is a case for allowing people without criminal records to carry a pistol in a holster or concealed. The best defence is staying out of cities as much as possible and being on the watch for suspicious people in places like railway stations, shopping centres, cinemas, churches, etc. Try to anticipate and get away before they strike.
Perhaps Islamisation in Europe is inevitable. It is that or radicalised Nationalism. As I say: If might is right… People younger than you or I can join the police and the army and work under orders against all the enemies of our continent and countries we wish to defend and serve.
“The USA has never had such a problem.”
Well, I would ask the various groupings of Native Americans (Indians) about that.
Perhaps we Anglos have actually been the problem.
It would appear that we White Europeans constituted the unregulated immigration of an armed horde that proved to be a far greater danger to the native populace than any immigration we are presently experiencing. Similar things can be said of much of world history for that matter. The movement of populations will happen – that’s a universal in human history. The trick, it would seem, is to find ways to make the inevitable transitions less painful.
Good point. The USA, apart from the Native Americans (so-called “Red Indians”), is a country of uncontrolled immigration – until the whites started controlling it. It’s the great melting pot of cultures, and frankly, this continent is big enough to allow all cultures to coexist as they do on the piece of land on this side of the Atlantic from Portugal to Siberia and China.
Perhaps the Islamisation of Europe is inevitable. If the kind of Islam was like that of Morocco and Tunisia, other religions could expect to be respected. If that of Saudi Arabia and Syria, increasingly that of Turkey – then we Christians are in big trouble. Perhaps the key to understanding secularist support of Islam is that they perceive Christianity to be impotent and supportive of weakness, whereas Islam is a religion of the strong and the survival of the fittest. This is something we have to try to understand.
It doesn’t seem to be an ideal era to bring children into the world!
Johan Huizinga (of Waning of the Middle Ages fame) gave a series of talks after the Second World War began, but before the Nazis invaded the Netherlands, which I read in Dutch but see are available in English translation as “Patriotism and Nationalism in European History”, in Men and Ideas: History, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, trans. James S. Holmes and Hans van Marle (New York: Meridian Books, 1959). Perhaps a proper love of ‘patria’ is a possible alternative to both things oppressively transnational (of various sorts and sources) and improper ‘Nationalism(s)’, but it will take considerable (re)cultivation – in the face of much resistance.
The history of Americas first immigrants (across the Bering land bridge) is a complicated and controversial one (see, for instance, Wikipedia’s “Settlement of the Americas” article), and that of its next immigrants or visitors wildly more so (see Wikipedia’s “Pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact theories”) – and it includes claims for early Muslim discovery or contact, variously pursued at present! (As well as Welsh ones – that Lake Poet Romantic, Robert Southey, published his long poem, ‘Madoc’, about this in 1805!)
For the period of the mid-18th to the mid-19th centuries, I have enjoyed Allen Eckert’s series of footnote-rich historical novels (various shortcomings notwithstanding).
If Europeans have been the latest and generally most drastic ‘problem’, a lot of warfare preceded it and them, with high-civilizational mass human sacrifice of prisoners of war in the thousands in some places, and at least celebratory legends of successful genocide in others.
Ed, some of the worst excesses of European settlement were done by the Portuguese and Spaniards, who are hardly “Anglos.”
I think your point is valid though. The Native populations of the Western Hemisphere let in this huge immigration that then turned on them, but then why should Europeans then turn around and make the same stupid mistake? One would think that the Islamic invasion and occupation of the Iberian Peninsular from 711 to 1492, the European Balkans, as well as the Muslim exterminations of the Christian population of Asia Minor (the last major exterminations happening in 1895 and 1915, in which millions of Greek, Armenian, and Assyrians were massacred) would still have some historical memory in Europe. But it is indeed interesting how only a few years of liberal indoctrination passing itself off as education can accomplish in the destruction of historical memory.
What I do not understand is the love that liberals have for Islam, a religious ideology that seems to be in direct contradiction to all of their perceived ideas. It is that liberals simply despise Christianity and Western Civilization more than Islamic terror?
As long as I am commending books by Huizinga, instead of rereading “Patriotism and Nationalism in European History”, I’ve embarked on the 1941 Dutch original of a book apparently published in translation in 1968 in both the US and UK as Dutch Civilisation in the Seventeenth Century – which looks like complementing his study of nationalism and patriotism in some ways (as well as, for, example, the booklet-length introduction to C.S. Lewis’s English Literature in the Sixteenth Century). In how far there is a sort of ‘layer’ of considering possible alternatives to the present day by way of historical comparison, I don’t know (it was a Dutch version written under the Nazi occupation of a book he wrote in German just before the Nazi takeover in Germany!), but there are interesting ‘things that have been’ which in some sense ‘might be again’.
With respect to North and South American history, I’ve just read about a story in the latest issue of the Islamic State’s English-language glossy, Dabiq, boasting about how much ‘better’ a job a state like theirs would have made of various things down the ages, including, ” ‘if it were the Muslims,’ instead of Christians, who had ‘fought the Japanese and Vietnamese or invaded the lands of the Native Americans, there would have been no regrets in killing and enslaving those therein.’ […] As for the Native Americans, the article continues, after the slaughter of their men, ‘then the Muslims would have taken their surviving women and children as slaves, raising the children as model Muslims and impregnating their women to produce a new generation of mujahidin.’ “
“I do believe that there is a case for allowing people without criminal records to carry a pistol in a holster or concealed.”
I seem to recall comments you have made in the past concerning Americans who advocate carrying guns……………..I believe you referred to them as “rednecks”. You say the USA has never had such a problem. You are wrong. European Americans who live in cities with large Negro populations have been forced to defend themselves against these home grown jihadists for many years. Islam may not be their motivation but their white victims are dead just the same.
You are still moderated, but I publish this comment to answer it. Since you started trolling and abusing under a bogus e-mail address and a changing IP address (you have a special device to hide your real one) for a question of an Orthodox cleric of allegedly questionable morals, you have revealed yourself as a full-blown racist and something near to the ideology of the Nazis and Fascists. This ideology is unacceptable at least where I live. I hope that you will be a victim of it in the country where you live.
I inform other readers of this blog that you have been trolling and sending abusive messages quite a lot this week. I deleted them. You, “Countess O”, are truly a despicable piece of scum. I am immune to your antics.
The question of guns is historically one of the US Constitution and the rights of citizens to legitimate self-defence against aggression by criminals or police / FBI agents abusing their authority. Criminals who use guns to commit crimes get their weapons illegally. In Europe, we are generally unarmed except possibily for a pepper spray or a taser in particularly risky places. I have never carried weapons in the street. I do subscribe to the idea that many tragedies might be averted by private persons having the possibility of shooting terrorists committing atrocities or about to do so. As the law presumes innocence before the proof of guilt, I would think that people without criminal records could have the benefit of not being assumed to be potential criminals. No legal disposition is infallible in all cases. In the USA, the question is very emotional, and gun toting seems often to be associated with an ultra-masculine self image and a sense of one’s own inadequacy. I have a small amount of experience with rifle and pistol shooting, from when I was at school, but I cannot help feeling that “those who live by the gun will die by the gun”.
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The troll answered this comment with invective and profanities, which I will not allow here.
“… and a changing IP address (you have a special device to hide your real one)”
No special device needed. He’s either using Tor or a VPN, both of which are easily available.
I imagine so, not having that degree of technical knowledge. “Countess O” remains anonymous and a predatory troll. If I had the technical knowledge and software, I could trace him / her / it. Then what? The best thing is not to feed trolls unless it is to illustrate a point for others. I take exception to this person’s bigotry and racism.
A grateful expression of sympathy and solidarity in keeping with the irenical and ecumenical approach happily characteristic of many on various sides of Church divisions since the Sixteenth century!