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The homily of Fr. Jean-Thomas de Beauregard O.P.

Blasphemy and the Bread of Exiles

Sometimes we say of someone, to excuse them, that they are more foolish than wicked. This is more or less what Jesus said to the Roman soldiers who were crucifying him on Calvary: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34). It is true that the men who crucified Jesus had no idea, at the moment they were doing it, of the gravity of the act they were committing. When the centurion realized this, it was too late. Thus, they were more foolish than wicked.

Often, when a blasphemy occurs, I make the same observation to myself: it is more foolish than wicked. And very often, this is true.

Foolishness is so widespread that there is not much risk in betting on it when something happens. Wickedness, true wickedness, despite original sin and the sum of personal sins, is rarer. Yes, very often the painful spectacle of ordinary blasphemy has more to do with foolishness than wickedness.

The Holy Spirit, who knows what He is doing, gives us today to meditate on the account of the multiplication of the loaves in the Gospel of John.

In other words, the day after a blasphemy perpetrated by worldwide television, commissioned by the French Republic and funded by the taxes of the French people, which concerned precisely the Lord’s Supper, that is exactly what the multiplication of loaves in the Gospel of John foreshadows. It culminates in the Cross, where Jesus, the living bread descended from heaven, is broken for our sins so that, having risen from the dead, He can be communicated to all in the sacrament of the Eucharist that we celebrate in Mass.

This blasphemy, it seems to me, is far from foolish; it is profoundly wicked. It is all the more a sin because, elsewhere, there were beautiful things happening. And unlike the Roman soldiers who crucified Jesus, those who thought of and realized this blasphemy knew full well what they were doing. They had the time and the means to think it through.

As for the fact that Jesus implores His Father to forgive them, I do not know. God’s mercy is infinite. But this blasphemy was, I repeat, far from foolish and profoundly evil.

No Christian wants everyone to kneel before the mystery of the Eucharist. As early as the 3rd century, the theologian Lucius Caecilius Firmianus Lactantius wrote: “We do not claim that anyone should be compelled against their will to worship our God, who is the God of all men, whether they like it or not, and we do not get angry if He is not worshiped.”

A Christian can also, if in the right mindset, smile at the irreverence of a sketch or a film towards the Christian faith. When Les Inconnus [a French comedy trio] parody the Last Supper or the Monty Python [a British comedy group] depict the Crucifixion of Jesus, we might find it in poor taste. But this mockery of the sacred aims at nothing but making people laugh.

Last Friday’s blasphemy was not meant to be humorous. On the contrary, it was very serious. In fact, it had all the appearance of a liturgy. The blasphemy was not meant to mock the sacred, which is quite painful for a Christian or for anyone who believes in God. No.

The blasphemy aimed to replace one sacred thing with another. And to be clear, the Eucharist, the sacrament that is the source and summit of Christian life, is trampled upon. Out with the old sacred. Here’s the new sacred.

And you, peoples of the earth, gathered before the altar of television and fed by social media notifications, worship this new divinity and communicate with us in this substitute religion. The old world is over; welcome to the new world.

This blasphemy was not foolish; it was wicked. It wasn’t merely a matter of mocking the sacred, but of replacing one sacred thing with another. The claims to assure us that it was not the Lord’s Supper being targeted, besides being hypocritical, change nothing. Because it was not an isolated incident. Everything aimed to impose a new sacrality before which we were all called to bow.

And here we are, Christians, forced into a sort of internal exile. For many of us, we no longer recognize our country and our time. This is all the more paradoxical because the Eucharist, the celebration of the Holy Mass, is what makes a Christian feel at home in any country.

Having lived abroad for many years, I can testify that the Holy Mass is what makes me feel at home anywhere in the world, because Christ is there offering Himself out of love, and the Church responds to love with love. The Eucharist is the bread of exiles, binding them to their true homeland.

And now, in France itself, in our country, we have been living in a sort of internal exile for some time. This is the ordinary Christian condition; any other configuration can only be temporary in this world. So what do we do?

Do we rebel and take up arms? Obviously not. Or, on the contrary, do we bend our backs and wait for things to pass, razing the walls in the hope of slipping under the radar of contemporary thought police? I don’t believe in that either. Some have tried and had no problem. But they lost the faith. Their faith, that of their children, and that of their compatriots who see no reason to be interested in a Catholic faith that even its defenders accept to be trampled upon from morning till night. Should we go into exile forever, somewhere more favorable?

So what should we do then? Be saints.

We should not be afraid to declare who we are, what we believe, and in whom we believe. We must preach the Gospel—both through our words and through our actions. We need to teach the Christian faith, in season and out of season. We ought to educate our children in the faith of the Church. We should not concede the fields of art, thought, and public discourse to others while limiting ourselves to family life. We cannot be satisfied with simply denouncing or condemning passively; instead, we need to respond with undeniable excellence in the very areas we have abandoned to our adversaries.

We must live by the Word of God received through the Tradition of the Church, not diluted to fit the whims of the day or the mortifying intellectual trends of the moment. We should live by the sacraments Jesus left to His Church, particularly the Eucharist and Confession.

We should turn the other cheek when attacked yet use that moment to open our mouths and proclaim the truth that sets us free.

Finally, we must reflect on what a Christian author wrote at the end of the second century, at the height of the persecution, in a famous text, the Ἐπιστολὴ πρὸς [Letter to Diognetus]:

[Christians] obey the established laws, but their way of life surpasses the laws in perfection. […] They conform to local customs regarding clothing, food, and lifestyle, while at the same time manifesting the extraordinary and truly paradoxical laws of their spiritual republic. […] In a word, what the soul is to the body, Christians are to the world.

The soul is spread throughout all the limbs of the body, just as Christians are spread throughout the cities of the world. […] Christians are like prisoners in the prison of the world; yet it is they who hold the world together. Such is the noble position that God has assigned them that they are not permitted to desert it. Amen.