Fundamentalist Catholics dodged France’s Coronavirus lockdown to hold a secret mass over Easter. The clandestine service took place at Paris’s Saint Nicolas du Chardonnet church, which has been occupied since 1977 by a renegade order that insists on holding services in Latin.
Police were called on Saturday evening by local people who heard sounds coming from the church.
They fined the priest but say all the other participants had left by the time they arrived. About 40 people are said to have been there. Video posted online shows priests and choirboys but nobody in the pews.
Social distancing does not seem to have been observed and the host was administered by hand into the mouths of the faithful.
Saint Nicolas du Chardonnet’s rejection of any form of modernisation, even if ordered by God’s representative on Earth, makes it popular with the Catholic far right. To read about its post-1977 history is to dig into a deep seam of reaction.
Long-time National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen reportedly often goes there to hear masses for dead friends. His estranged daughter Marine, who nicked his party off him, had her three children baptised there.
Maxime Brunaire, the young nutter who tried to assassinate then president Jacques Chirac during the 2003 Bastille Day parade, worshipped there and the editors of far-right rags like Minute and l’Oeuvre française have put in an appearance from time to time.
The funerals of Paul Touvier, the only Frenchman ever convicted of crimes against humanity, for his participation in the Holocaust under Vichy France, and National Front bigwig Jean-Marie Stirbois were held there.
Other churches in France have observed the lockdown, although a priest and his 13-strong flock were caught holding a mass on a campsite last month.
Other people worship mammon, notably the French bosses’ union, the Medef. Its leader, the magnificently named Geoffroy Roux de Bézieux, has declared that the plebs will have to give up some of their rights to pay for the cost of the lockdown.
De Bézieux thinks that the length of the working week, public holidays and paid holiday should be reexamined once it’s all more or less over. As it happens, this is not the first time the Medef has raised these questions.
It doesn’t seem that de Bézieux has suggested to his members that they pay out lower dividends and invest in more productive technology in response to the crisis.
The junior minister for the economy, Agnès Pannier-Runacher, has also said we will probably have to work “a bit harder” to make up the loss of production.
Even the leader of the mainstream right Républicains, Xavier Bertrand, is shocked by these suggestions.
“The people who rule us have to put themselves in the French people’s place for a quarter of a second,” he told BFMTV. “If their answer once the crisis is over is more austerity, they haven’t understood a thing.”
France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at 14,393, a rise of 561 in 24 hours. 31,826 people are in hospital, up 506, but the number of people in intensive care has gone down for the fourth day running, by 38. 27,186 people have been discharged from hospital.
