Conservative Christians Protest in Paris

The protests against the financial world’s behavior that started in New York City and spread to other major American cities are now in Europe. Berlin and London are the latest cities to see such protests.

The London protest, complete with tents and vows to stay until things change is different because it is in front of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and the bishop and dean of St. Paul’s are trying to support the protesters while demanding that no violence will be tolerated. This 1960s-style sit-in is relatively peaceful, and the question being asked is what it will really accomplish.

But, this week there was another kind of protest in Paris. It occurred outside a Paris theatre where a play was being presented. The play is about Jesus and the protesters are conservative Catholic Christians, who protested the decision of the city of Paris to allow the play to be presented. Why? Because at the end there is a display of a painting of Jesus’ face smeared with excrement.

The protesters say that they cannot support freedom of artistic commentary when it becomes so degraded that it defames the person of Jesus Christ. One thinks immediately of the Muslims who protest against the use of the image of Mohammed in cartoons and political commentaries.

The mayor of Paris has said that the play will continue. The Catholic bishop of Paris has called the protesters people who are looking for an excuse to resort to violence against society.  

I’m not so sure about that, but I have no real information one way or the other. What I do know is that the Christian protesters are members of a very conservative group within the Catholic Church that favors the use of Latin in the Mass and wants a return to the liturgy that was used before Pope John XXIII modernized the Roman Mass.

I also know that there must be better, more sophisticated ways of expressing displeasure with Christianity, but freedom of speech often leads to insulting behavior that most find too offensive to tolerate. We remember the first American flag burnings that finally led to the US Supreme court saying that they were protected forms of speech.

The US Supreme Court will probably never get to express its opinion about the Paris play but one wonders how far the Court would go to try to accommodate free speech in the face of what the Paris protesters see as religious desecration.

It is also interesting that in France, which prides itself on its laicity and detachment from the Catholic Church, which is the preferred church of more than 90% of the French indigenous population, the protesters raised another point - that France is a Christian nation that has bent over backwards to accommodate non-Christian religions, and that now it is time to protect and nurture Christianity.  French President Sarkozy said almost the same thing last Spring in a speech, but his remarks were only casually noted in the French media.

One wonders if Christians are beginning to feel the pinch of tolerance in what they see as a lose-lose for their religion and a win-win for the others. If minority religions are treated with care in order to protect their rights, wouldn’t it be logical to say that the same rules apply to Christianity in these times when all religions are under seige?