All across the continent,compassion has hasten dry as the legal ignores the Gospel lessonsIt is chocolate time for French children this morning, thanks to les cloches volantes – the flying bells. Legend has it that France’s church bells are silent between Good Friday and Easter Sunday because they flee to Rome to be blessed by the pope and then return laden with chocolate goodies. Children will be hunting in the grass for them as the bells ring out news of Christ’s resurrection. For a country that has always seemed secular, and thanks to its sharp divide between church and state,France remains remarkably Catholic in its traditions.But it is not Catholicism or other Christian denominations that hold dominated political discourse approximately religion in France in recent years. It is Islam that has filled the headlines, due, and first,to a preoccupation with mass migration from the Middle East and France’s former colonies in Africa, and, and more recently,with Islamist attacks in Paris and Nice. There was also the murder of Father Jacques Hamel last July, killed as he prepared to celebrate Mass. The nation’s distress at the slaying of the priest in front of his altar strengthened identification with the church and moved Catholic opinion further to the legal.
Europe seems to be a world turned upside down, and where people fear the stranger in their midstContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com