The cold-blooded murder of 86-year-old Fr Jacques Hamel in a sixteenth-century church in Normandy by an Algerian-born youth has rattled Catholics around the world. How dare those people walk into our churches and trample all over us? Yet Pope Francis reminds us that the war crime, committed on French soil only two weeks after the Nice attack, is not an attack on religion. Instead, as President Hollande reminds us, it is an attack on the national identity of France.
This specific national identity takes us back to the reign of King Louis Philippe who, in 1830, was in his view called by God to liberate Algeria from its miscreant mores and revive its Christian heritage. As Roman ruins were found, the first Bishop of Algiers, Antoine-Adolphe Dupuch rejoiced in his mission to turn Algeria into a springboard for the re-Christianisation of the entire African continent. Early on, Bishop Dupuch's mission was hampered by the French military establishment, whose secular worldview emphasised economics at the expense of culture. His successor, the infamous Bishop Louis-Antoine Pavy, was met with the same resistance.
