CNA Staff, Jul 28, 2020 / 09:30 am (CNA).- In 2019, two friends launched a movement to protect churches across France in response to a wave of desecrations.
The friends — identified by their first names, Gauthier and Guillaume — decided to act after reading about the hundreds of attacks taking place annually against French churches. The incidents ranged from graffiti to the desecration of tabernacles.
Their idea was simple: instead of merely lamenting the attacks, they would take practical action. They decided to hold peaceful nighttime vigils outside churches, together with other young people, to deter potential aggressors.
The organization they founded, Protège ton église (Protect Your Church), spread quickly across France. Soon there were sections in Paris, Nantes, Nice, and other cities dotted around the country.
Protège ton église did not respond to a request from CNA for comment. But in a May 2019 interview with the blog Le Salon Beige, Gauthier said: “The watchers are mostly between 18 and 30 and this promotes a fraternal and very enjoyable atmosphere within the groups. This youthful atmosphere also encourages openness because passers-by are intrigued and ask the watchers questions during the rounds.”
“We have both committed students and young working people, married or engaged. We insist on the need to have people with balanced, mature, and reasonable lives. The group is mainly made up of Catholics, but there are also people from other backgrounds who are eager to ‘feel useful,’ to defend a just and noble cause.”
Activities are organized mainly through Facebook. Protège ton église publishes photos of vigils on its page. The organization is careful not to identify participants, asking them to publish photos with their backs to the camera. Leaders only identify themselves in public by their first names. They take these precautions to avoid aggressive online attention or confrontations with would-be vandals.
“The point is, first and foremost, to demonstrate that anti-Christian acts do not leave us indifferent and that France is capable of protecting its heritage and its roots,” Gauthier said in the 2019 interview, which was translated into English by the Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination Against Christians in Europe in Vienna.
“For Catholics, it goes even further, because a church is where the tabernacle is located — that is, the real presence of God who sacrificed himself for man’s salvation.”
Protège ton Eglise shares information about its activities with the Paris-based l’Observatoire de la christianophobie (Observatory of Christianophobia), which meticulously documents anti-Christian acts in France.
Guillaume de Thieulloy, the Observatory’s founder, told CNA: “We have no institutional link with Protège ton Eglise, but we gladly relay their actions.”
“As for the impact of their action, I would say that it is mainly symbolic (in the sense that they are too few in number to physically protect the 40,000 or so churches in France), but their action helps to awaken consciences and alert people to the threats to Christian places of worship — all the more so as they have a certain audience, especially on social networks.”
He continued: “It is quite striking that young people form a good part of the active Catholics in France (this is particularly evident in the pro-life demonstrations, but also in the support for persecuted Christians).”
“The generation of people who were 20 years old at the time of the [Second Vatican] Council tended more towards ‘burying one’s faith,’ as they used to say at the time. This is no longer the case: young priests are more willing to wear the cassock and young lay people assume their Catholic identity more easily.”
De Thieulloy noted that Protège ton église had not received much mainstream media coverage in France. He said the group was more likely to reach supporters through appearances on the web television platform TV Libertés or on the website of l’Observatoire de la christianophobie, rather than through interviews on a French public national television channel.
Protège ton église welcomes new members, but encourages those who are unable to attend vigils to join in through prayer.
“We ask Catholics to pray for us,” Gauthier said in the 2019 interview, “for our action, for our movement, for all our watchers, but also for all those who are the source of vandalism or desecration because, as Our Lord Jesus Christ said to his Divine Father: ‘They know not what they do.’”
“We must pray for their souls and their conversion. And we must pray more for France by asking St. Louis and St. Joan of Arc to intercede for it.”
The organization has a patron saint: Blessed Noël Pinot, who was arrested while celebrating a clandestine Mass in 1794, following the French Revolution. When he was guillotined, he was wearing the vestments he wore at the Mass. Eyewitnesses said that while waiting to ascend the steps, he recited the opening words from the Mass, “Introibo ad altare Dei” (I will go unto the altar of God).
A seminarian who has taken part in Protège ton église vigils composed a prayer in honor of the Blessed.
It reads: “God, our Father, You who have crowned Blessed Noël Pinot with the laurels of martyrdom, we pray to you: Give us the grace to respond every day and until our death to the call you have made to us to protect your Church. Through his intercession, inspire us with the right words and actions.”
“Enlighten and strengthen us, make us, like our patron saint, invincible in the defense of the Church and the propagation of the faith. Deign to grant your forgiveness to those who, ignorant of you, hate you and attack your Bride.”
“God, our Father, through the intercession of the Virgin Mary, we ask you to hasten the day where the Church will proclaim the holiness of her life. ‘Lord who has given your life for me, may I gladly give you mine.’”
[…]
What is there to celebrate about 500 years of heresy?
I’m fairly sure the Protestants involved don’t view it as heresy. Not defending it; just pointing out the obvious.
I’m fairly sure many of the Catholics involved don’t either!
Good for them – more power to them.
A Lutheran Chief of Chaplain Service once told me we Catholics are obsessed with the Law. It seems a hangover from Luther’s insistence that faith alone saves. I responded our laws focus on charity. He in his own way was a charitable person. He responded he thought of becoming Catholic. Despite the inane comment by Steven Fuit, president of the UPCB that “our unity essentially derives from respecting differences” our unity derives from faith in Christ and following His commandments, even if the latter is tacitly admitted by the practice of many Lutherans.
MORTALIUM ANIMOS
ENCYCLICAL OF POPE PIUS XI
ON RELIGIOUS UNITY
TO OUR VENERABLE BRETHREN THE PATRIARCHS, PRIMATES,
ARCHBISHOPS, BISHOPS, AND OTHER LOCAL ORDINARIES
IN PEACE AND COMMUNION WITH THE APOSTOLIC SEE.
ENCYCLICAL OF POPE PIUS XI
ON RELIGIOUS UNITY
6. We were created by God, the Creator of the universe, in order that we might know Him and serve Him; our Author therefore has a perfect right to our service. God might, indeed, have prescribed for man’s government only the natural law, which, in His creation, He imprinted on his soul, and have regulated the progress of that same law by His ordinary providence; but He preferred rather to impose precepts, which we were to obey, and in the course of time, namely from the beginnings of the human race until the coming and preaching of Jesus Christ, He Himself taught man the duties which a rational creature owes to its Creator: “God, who at sundry times and in divers manners, spoke in times past to the fathers by the prophets, last of all, in these days, hath spoken to us by his Son.”[3] From which it follows that there can be no true religion other than that which is founded on the revealed word of God: which revelation, begun from the beginning and continued under the Old Law, Christ Jesus Himself under the New Law perfected. Now, if God has spoken (and it is historically certain that He has truly spoken), all must see that it is man’s duty to believe absolutely God’s revelation and to obey implicitly His commands; that we might rightly do both, for the glory of God and our own salvation, the Only-begotten Son of God founded His Church on earth. Further, We believe that those who call themselves Christians can do no other than believe that a Church, and that Church one, was established by Christ; but if it is further inquired of what nature according to the will of its Author it must be, then all do not agree. A good number of them, for example, deny that the Church of Christ must be visible and apparent, at least to such a degree that it appears as one body of faithful, agreeing in one and the same doctrine under one teaching authority and government; but, on the contrary, they understand a visible Church as nothing else than a Federation, composed of various communities of Christians, even though they adhere to different doctrines, which may even be incompatible one with another. Instead, Christ our Lord instituted His Church as a perfect society, external of its nature and perceptible to the senses, which should carry on in the future the work of the salvation of the human race, under the leadership of one head,[4] with an authority teaching by word of mouth,[5] and by the ministry of the sacraments, the founts of heavenly grace;[6] for which reason He attested by comparison the similarity of the Church to a kingdom,[7] to a house,[8] to a sheepfold,[9] and to a flock.[10] This Church, after being so wonderfully instituted, could not, on the removal by death of its Founder and of the Apostles who were the pioneers in propagating it, be entirely extinguished and cease to be, for to it was given the commandment to lead all men, without distinction of time or place, to eternal salvation: “Going therefore, teach ye all nations.”[11] In the continual carrying out of this task, will any element of strength and efficiency be wanting to the Church, when Christ Himself is perpetually present to it, according to His solemn promise: “Behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world?”[12] It follows then that the Church of Christ not only exists to-day and always, but is also exactly the same as it was in the time of the Apostles, unless we were to say, which God forbid, either that Christ our Lord could not effect His purpose, or that He erred when He asserted that the gates of hell should never prevail against it.[13]