The funeral Mass for Fr Jacques Hamel in Rouen Cathedral on Tuesday raised all the big questions: life and death; good and evil. But amid the bells, organ music, incense, candles and weeping, the future of France's Muslim minority was an insistent if unstated question.
When two 19-year-old Frenchmen of Arab origin slit Fr Jacques's throat on June 24th, claiming their crime for Islamic State, Monsignor Dominique Lebrun, Archbishop of Rouen, made "fraternity and prayer" his answer to the attack.
“Must there be further slaughter?” the bishop asked on Tuesday. “Too many violent deaths. It’s enough. Evil is a mystery.”
Msgr Lebrun recounted the last moments of Fr Jacques’s life. “He fell to the floor after the first blows of the knife and tried to push them with his feet. ‘Go away Satan! Go away Satan,’ he cried.”
The old woman beside me closed her eyes and shuddered.
Kept secret
Fr Jacques’s sisters and brother, nieces and nephews, sat at the front of the cathedral. They have asked that his place of burial remain secret, to prevent it becoming a place of pilgrimage for Christians - or jihadists.
The family asked that the passage from the Sermon on the Mount, about turning the other cheek, be read at the priest’s funeral.
“Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you,” a priest read.
Msgr Lebrun returned to the passage in his homily, saying, “Father, we dare to pray for the assassins.”
The priest’s sister Roselyne, an elderly woman who had to be helped to the lectern, recounted that Fr Jacques had been a soldier in the 1954-1962 Algerian war. “He refused to be an officer, because he would have been forced to order other men to kill,” she said. “He was the only survivor of a shoot-out at an oasis, and he often asked, ‘Why me?’”
Hidden from view
A Muslim delegation sat hidden from view in the right front transept of the cathedral, as they had at an earlier Mass in Fr Jacques’s honour on Sunday. “The words, gestures and visits of our Muslim friends are a considerable step,” Msgr Lebrun said.
Interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve, who is in charge of government relations with religious leaders, attended the Mass.
On Monday, he said 20 mosques and prayer rooms had been closed, and 80 imams expelled from France. He has given himself until October to create a new foundation intended to "truly refound the relationship with Islam in France".
I met Mariama Souma (39), a care-giver for the elderly, from Guinea-Conakry, as we queued in the rain outside the cathedral. A practising Muslim, she does not wear a headscarf because “it’s better to follow the customs of the country you’re in”.
By attending Fr Jacques’s funeral, Souma said she wanted “to show that Christians and Muslims, we’re all the same. It’s the same God.”
Souma’s elderly charges tell her that “foreigners should go home because they created this mess”. She dismisses their venom as “just blowing off steam”, but adds, “I’m afraid of being expelled. And I worry about my children. I don’t know what path they’ll take.”
Frédérique Guignebert (48) sat next to me in the cathedral. By chance, she too is a care-giver for the elderly. She lives on the plateau above Rouen, where, she claims, 90 per cent of her neighbours are Muslim immigrants.
‘They want revenge’
"I have six children and two grandchildren and I'm afraid for them," Guignebert said. "I'm afraid of a civil war. Da'esh [Islamic State, also known as Isis] is trying to make Christians attack Muslims. There are francais de souche (native Frenchmen) who want revenge.
"I read it every day on Facebook: 'Death to Muslims'. Photos of pigs' heads nailed to mosque doors."
France is the victim of "a massive Arabo-Muslim invasion", Nadine Morano, a former cabinet minister from the conservative party Les Républicains, told French radio earlier in the day. "I don't want France to become Muslim," she added.
