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Tuesday, July 26, 2016

Priest Beheaded, Pope Condemns 'All Forms of Hatred'

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Father Jacques Hamel, knifed to death by 'a hater' while saying Mass Father Jacques Hamel, knifed to death by 'a hater' while saying Mass
Francois Hollande says France is at war with ISIS after two Islamist knifemen butchered a French priest and left a nun fighting for her life before they were both shot dead by police in Normandy.

One of the men who stormed into the church in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray near Rouen during mass was a local man, who was being monitored by electronic tag after being jailed for trying to join fanatics in Syria.

The 84-year-old priest, named as Jacques Hamel, had his throats cut while a nun is critically injured in hospital following the raid which saw five people held hostage by ISIS assailants shouting 'Allahu Akbar'.

The two killers were 'neutralised' by  marksmen as they emerged from the building, which is now being searched for explosives. French president Hollande said France is 'at war' with ISIS while the terror group has claimed responsibility for the killing.

It comes as it emerged that the building was one of a number of Catholic churches on a terrorist 'hit list' found on a suspected ISIS extremist last April.

There are also reports that one of the attackers was a local resident who was under electronic tag surveillance having been jailed in France for trying to travel to Syria in 2015. His bail terms allowed him to be unsupervised between 8.30am and 12.30pm - the attack happened between 9am and 11am. READ MORE HERE 

REMNANT COMMENT: According to a CNS report, Pope Francis was informed of the execution of Father Hamel. "With pain and horror" for the "absurd violence," Pope Francis expressed his condemnation of "every form of hatred" and offered his prayers for all those involved.

"Every form of hatred"?  What a terribly safe thing to say!  What about this particular form of hatred, Your Holiness—the one that just led to the beheading of one of your own priests? Nothing? Just a heads-up on hatred in general? Really?!

I suppose the Pope wouldn't want to condemn by name the one form of hatred which is turning the cities of former Christendom into warzones. No, heaven forbid that the People's Pope would thunder an anathema against the violent defenders of the great Christian heresy that has the Islamic world  hell-bent on blowing everything up, raping women in the streets, downing aircraft and ripping the heads off Catholic priests. No, any sort condemnation like that--aside from being actually useful—would put the lie to Francis's painfully politically correct gibberish about Islam the "religion of peace."

Francis wants us to know that “all forms of hatred”—especially homophobia, of course—are bad. In fact, we can count on Francis to step right up every time and lead the cheer: "Hey hey, hell no, hatred's gotta go!"  

Maybe it's time to plant another tree or something.  But ever since the pope started planting his little trees, with all those cameras rolling, the world's been going up in flames, with mass graves filling fast with murdered Christians.  So aside from providing yet another symbol-over-substance photo op for Francis the Humble, what's the point of these self-promotional exercises in papal reforestation?

Maybe it's time for the Holy Father to stop planting trees, in fact, and get back to cultivating the mustard seed instead, perhaps even preaching the Kingdom of God and the Kingship of Christ--you know, the 'popey' stuff that actually matters.

For now, I guess it's just going to be more of this type of silliness:

 


Eternal rest grant unto, Father Hamel, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him. May he rest in peace.
 
 

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Last modified on Tuesday, July 26, 2016
Michael J. Matt | Editor

Michael J. Matt has been an editor of The Remnant since 1990. Since 1994, he has been the newspaper's editor. A graduate of Christendom College, Michael Matt has written hundreds of articles on the state of the Church and the modern world. He is the host of The Remnant Underground and Remnant TV's The Remnant Forum. He's been U.S. Coordinator for Notre Dame de Chrétienté in Paris--the organization responsible for the Pentecost Pilgrimage to Chartres, France--since 2000.  Mr. Matt has led the U.S. contingent on the Pilgrimage to Chartres for the last 24 years. He is a lecturer for the Roman Forum's Summer Symposium in Gardone Riviera, Italy. He is the author of Christian Fables, Legends of Christmas and Gods of Wasteland (Fifty Years of Rock ‘n’ Roll) and regularly delivers addresses and conferences to Catholic groups about the Mass, home-schooling, and the culture question. Together with his wife, Carol Lynn and their seven children, Mr. Matt currently resides in St. Paul, Minnesota.

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