Even the Pope is wrongfooted by Islamists’ slaughter of a priest

Melanie McDonagh

THE elderly priest, Fr Jacques Hamel, was old even by the standards of the French church, where the official retirement age for priests is 75; he was 86. “I’ll work till my dying breath,” he promised. He did too. He died on his knees at the altar of the church where he had said mass, his throat slit in the presence of the eucharist.

The mass is, among other things, a memorial of the sacrifice of Christ on the cross. So he died pretty well a perfect death in Christian terms: murdered for his faith, bearing witness to it. He died quite literally a martyr, and in a church dedicated to the first Christian martyr: St Etienne, or Stephen. His attackers were also seeking a martyr’s death but of a very different kind.

Obviously, priests and nuns are vulnerable as the public face of Christianity for Islamists seeking to attack Christians, as is drearily commonplace throughout the Muslim world, not just in those parts of Iraq and Syria under the control of Islamic State but in aggressively Muslim societies such as Pakistan.

In a video released by IS, the 19-year-old boys who carried out the killing in Rouen, Normandy, said they were obeying calls to “target countries of the Crusader coalition”. So far so standard; this is the third IS video in nine days.

But for a priest to be killed at the very altar of the church, the place of sacrifice, is symbolically significant even after recent horrors. The last similar take on Murder in the Cathedral was when El Salvadorean soldiers assassinated Archbishop Oscar Romero in his own cathedral in 1980.

For these young Islamists, the method of execution — throat-slitting or decapitation — is a return to those employed in the earliest period of Islam. Not “medieval” so much as seventh-century, with the 21st-century twist that they forced an elderly parishioner to film the killing on his phone before stabbing him. Actually, one distinguished historian of the Crusades, Jonathan Riley Smith, observed tartly to me that the murder of priests strikes him as more modern than medieval; the obvious precedents being modern conflicts such as the Spanish Civil War or, even more obviously, the present conflict in Syria and Iraq.

Fr Hamel wasn’t sectarian. His last Easter reflection was about mercy; he would have forgiven his attackers very readily. As one of the nuns with him during the attack said: “He was a priest who loved everyone, who loved much.”

Pope Francis reflected on the death that “the world is at war because it has lost the peace”. Rather hastily, he added that he didn’t mean war between religions because religions seek peace but other wars including “war for the domination of peoples”.

The Pope is wrong. IS does seek the domination of peoples but for a clear religious objective: the establishment of a Muslim caliphate. Its activities, including Fr Hamel’s murder, are only comprehensible in ideological terms. It’s one thing to observe that IS is repugnant to the great majority of Muslims, quite a not he r not t o a c k nowledge it is grounded in a particularly unpleasant Islamic ideology, which has surfaced at other times in history.

President Hollande, who attended mass for the priest in Notre Dame, does not often echo the Pope but he too declared “we are at war” with the jihadists. The French Republic has historic a l l y, to put i t mi l d l y, a f r au g h t relationship with the Catholic church. It would be remarkable if the Islamists were to bring them closer together.