The Mosque of Notre Dame

^{CHAPTER 8} THE ROAD THROUGH THE DARKNESS

“Father Lothaire, may I walk with you for a while?”

The priest, who had come out by himself, looked at Eugène-Olivier without recognizing him. Or perhaps he did recognize him after all? He nodded his head absentmindedly, without his usual good-natured smile.

“I really don’t like sharing such an unpleasant walk with anyone,” the priest finally said. “Tonight I will not sleep in my shelter, but in the subway.”

The young man knew that it was not good to spend the night in the same place over an extended period.

“What station are you going to?”

“Place de Clichy.”

“Doesn’t it seem to you, Father, that you won’t get to sleep until tomorrow? Because it will take you until dawn to get to Clichy.”

“It would on foot.” As the priest now looked carefully at Eugène-Olivier, and a smile finally appeared on his lips. Eugène-Olivier would never have admitted to himself how long he had waited for that restrained, good-natured smile. “I’m going to use transportation.”

“Transportation in an abandoned metro? A carriage with six white horses? Or by dragon?”

“How romantic you atheists are!” mused Father Lothaire. “You’ll see. You know what, young Lévêque. Keep me company, but only if you can sleep there as well. Then I don’t have to look for anyone else. Because I will need a bit of help.”

“At your service.”

When they had passed a part of the street, they descended into the Bastille station, mixing with the colorful crowd of workmen. It was dominated by blacks, who disliked work and preferred to live on social assistance, and Turkish workers, the most industrious inhabitants of the sharia zone.

Half of the Paris subway, known in the best of times for its discomfort and its tangled routes, was out of service, and the rest was very dirty. You wouldn’t be checked for documents, but you had to keep a hand on your wallet. The poor, who milled around, selling cheap wares or looking for hand-outs in the passageways and below the rusty advertising boards, were transformed into pickpockets in the blink of an eye. Dirty children begged for alms that no one gave, and then moved through the crowd searching for a victim. Cutting off a passing woman’s handbag was a trifle for them.

Official signs were posted to show which branches were in service. In some places, the empty tunnels were not even fenced off. Why would they be? Wealthy Parisians did not take the subway. Surface transportation with conductors was more dignified.

Making his way with Father Lothaire past the displays of smuggled merchandise arranged on the floor for sale, Eugène-Olivier was constantly afraid that people in the crowd would understand that they were looking at a priest. It was an irrational fear. In his overalls, they were as likely to know he was a priest as they were to think he was the Imam of Paris.

Having passed through two passages, they left the crowd and turned into the black sleeve of an empty tunnel.

“Do you think, your reverence, that it’s prudent to wander around in abandoned tunnels?” Darkness soon replaced the dim light, and the sudden silence became deafening. “You probably don’t even have a pistol.”

“And what would I do with a pistol?”

“Ah, yes, you’re forbidden to kill! But they say that criminals, thieves, drug dealers, and who-knows-who-else hide here.”

“Have you ever seen them?”

“To tell the truth, I’ve never had the opportunity.”

“Drug dealers, thieves, pimps, and murderers live peacefully above, in the sharia zone. The percentage of those who are pursued by the police is so small that criminals have little need to visit unpleasant places like this. The police catch exactly as many criminals as they need to organize public punishments and cut off the hands of some thieves. The rest are simply kept in check. That seems to be satisfactory for everyone.”

Father Lothaire took something out of the pocket of his overalls. There was a click and then a light appeared in front of them. “Every megalopolis, even the worst, has to survive and maintain a complex balance. When the balance is disturbed, it results in a deadly hurricane.”

The ground under their feet was damp, and it was necessary to climb onto platforms.

“I also wanted to ask you, reverend father, why the Muslims claim that they communicate directly with God, and this makes them better than Christians. Given, of course, that all this is nonsense.”

“Excellent, Eugène-Olivier. For you, a materialist, everything that the Muslims believe is nonsense. But if you have already begun to comprehend that you need to understand the nature of the conflict between them and those who believe differently, that means you are growing. The man who barricades himself behind the walls of his opinions limits the freedom of his own thought. Even if you remain a materialist,” Father Lothaire added, smiling slightly, “you will have an advantage over them if you see them with the eyes of a Christian.”

“There is no reason to praise me for a question. Sophia Sevazmios told me to ask you. What is it all about?”

“It’s a game with an open deck of cards where the ace is pulled out of one’s sleeve. ‘Direct conversation with Allah, unlike the Christians.’ So many people were caught up by that phrase at the end of the last century!

“Every Christian can address God directly; moreover, he must do so. It is called prayer. God listens to these prayers. Perhaps the Muslims mean a dialogue? Man addresses God and receives a response. But let’s think logically now: Is every man capable of absorbing wisdom from a Being who is incomprehensible to our weak reason? He might very well go mad. It’s not that God doesn’t want to respond to us ordinary mortals. It’s that we don’t readily understand the Truth.

“There are mortals who receive a sort of training. They lead a daily battle against their sinful nature. They are oriented toward achieving the Truth with all their thoughts, all their motives. We call them saints. Thus, saints sometimes get a response. They have clear visions; they have intuitions that let them grasp things that we can’t.

“But Muslims believe that every one of them is competent for ‘dialogue without an intermediary.’ They claim to be able to do this, despite being sinful and distracted by our passions, just by reading a prayer.”

“So they mumble something, and then believe they have heard the answer of the Almighty?” asked Eugène-Olivier.

“In the best of cases,” Father Lothaire said. “In a very good case, that might even be what happens. But don’t forget, there is someone else very interested in dialogue with untrained beings.”

“You mean the devil?”

“That’s understood. But it isn’t the whole problem. Contrary to what the Muslims claim, they do have people who are supposed to act as intermediaries between themselves and God. All those imams, mullahs, sheiks—why else do they exist?”

“So it makes no sense to say they are better than us because we have a clergy. So do they!”

Father Lothaire noted to himself that Eugène-Olivier used the words “we” and “us.”

“There’s no sense, and there’s no real clergy, either,” the priest said. “We can only compare a Muslim imam with a Protestant pastor or a Baptist preacher. Christianity, true Christianity, is a mystery religion. Islam is without mystery from the very beginning.”

“And what is mystery?”

“Magic, as children would say. The functions for which a Christian needs a priest simply do not exist in Islam.”

“Ah, the bread into the Body, the wine into the Blood.”

“That, first of all. You know, young Lévêque, it’s easy to deal with one wrong idea. But when several bits of nonsense are incorporated into one claim, you can imagine how hard it is to explain. The sentence, ‘Muslims speak with God without an intermediary,’ is wrong at several levels. But as rhetoric, it worked well when Muslims still made the effort to convince people with words. With repetition, stupidity can be stronger than any oath.”

“I never would have thought that it could be so interesting. I’ve always thought that I didn’t care what they think.”

The rays of light from the flashlight in Father Lothaire’s hands would grow shorter as they collided with close partitions, or longer as they came into a wider area. But in the underground, it is always stuffy and damp.

“The qadi I blew up believed that immediately after death he would begin making love with seventy-two houris.”

“I can’t guarantee it, but his expectations were probably confirmed.”

Eugène-Olivier laughed.

Father Lothaire added, “I’m not joking. Do you know what houris are?”

“Beautiful girls ‘upon whom neither dust nor dirt fall.’”

“Add to that, that they don’t menstruate, that they don’t get old, and that they can’t get pregnant. Where do they come from? Are they supposed to be what faithful Muslim women become after death? None of the reliable Islamic sources says that. It appears that houris from the beginning were created as houris. And that they are insatiable in sex.”

“So it’s a dirty fairy tale.”

“Maybe yes, and maybe no. The Middle Ages did not know Islam very well, but they left us a rather detailed description of the demons called succubi and incubi. The succubus is a demon in female form that seeks sexual relations with men. Note that it’s a demon in female form, not a woman. And sexual relations with a demon always end in death…”

“Are you saying that the houri is a real thing? That it’s a succubus?” Perhaps Father Lothaire dabbled in nonsense after all.

“I’m saying that the devil frequently keeps his promises,” said the priest sharply. “He says, ‘You will be able to have sex with seventy-two raven-haired beauties.’ And man thinks, ‘How wonderful!’ It doesn’t occur to him to ask, ‘But will I like it?’ And when one of the twelve gates of hell opens, it’s too late. It’s too late to scream, when one of the black-eyed beauties grabs him and begins to enjoy him, and then turns him over to another. And when he runs out of strength, he must eat the special meat of the local bulls that greatly increases male stamina—and chew quickly, because the third beauty is already holding out her arms… And so on—constantly, eternally, sex with inhuman beings and nothing else. It’s useless to cry, to beg for mercy. The devil asks, ‘Is that what you wanted? Is that what you called your just reward? Well, here it is, enjoy it!’”

“And you really believe in that?” Eugène-Olivier tripped on something, but kept his balance.

“Everything we are encountering today was described long ago. There’s nothing new under the moon. Speaking of the moon, do you think it’s a coincidence that our calendar is solar and theirs is lunar? The moon is a dead light, unlike the life-giving sun. Throughout time, all devil-worshippers have revered the moon.”

“You’re saying Muslims worship the devil?” Eugène-Olivier whistled. The sound echoed unpleasantly in the dark.

“As a Christian priest, I can’t ignore what must make me cautious,” Father Lothaire replied seriously. “If they tell me that in Heaven, men are greeted by beings that sound like the description of succubi, I have to ask myself—is that Heaven? It sounds more like hell. If the chief symbol of a religion is the moon, how can I not remember that Satanism is inseparable from the cult of the moon?”

“I can’t imagine how it is possible to seriously believe in the devil, in hell, or even in Heaven, to be honest. In my opinion, Muslims are just fanatics or they have a screw loose. But you… Forgive me, your reverence, but I simply can’t lie.”

“Not at all… Now, where is that device? Aha! Now we’ll travel in style.” The flashlight settled on a cart with a long handle that looked somewhat like a child’s swing set.

“A handcar! This is luxury, your reverence. How would you have made this trip alone? On foot?”

“By no means.”

“You can operate a handcar by yourself?” asked Eugène-Olivier incredulously.

“It wouldn’t be the first time. When I was still in school, they dedicated a lot of attention to sports. A useful habit, I always say.”

They got in, and began working the handle between them. The car lurched into motion and began slowly picking up speed.

“What was that you were saying about the screws in my head?”

“I didn’t say that about you…”

“What’s the difference, if you used a more carefully chosen expression for me than for the Muslims?”

“You’re right, Father Lothaire. Were you joking perhaps? I understand that you really love the Mass and I understand that while you’re alive, you won’t allow anyone to ban it. I can understand that Christianity is a very important part of our culture and that it is worth dying for… But all that about the devil, demons, angels, Heaven, hell… I thought that priests also agreed now that these are just symbols.”

“The generations of Catholic priests who considered the devil to be a metaphor remain in the past,” answered Father Lothaire. “It may be that some are burning in the same hell they considered to be a metaphor. Because of them, the visible Roman Church fell. They were the ones who said, ‘All people are going to God, it’s just that each of them is following his own path! We don’t need missionaries!’

“If Christ’s church had no awareness that it is the only vessel of Truth, it would not be His church. It would not be alive. It would be an eye without sight, a body without a soul. For centuries the visible Roman Church proclaimed ‘Only I am right!’ But in the late-nineteenth century, voices of liberalism in the Church stole in to whisper, ‘…But everyone is right in his own way.’

“At first they taught this and related absurdities secretly, corrupting seminarians with the idea that man—and in particular, enlightened, educated, modern men like themselves—could know better than the teachings and tradition of the church of Jesus Christ. It was actually an ancient lie, as all heresies are—in this case dating from centuries before Christ—the error of Gnosticism. Christian gnostics believed that men are not really saved by Christ, but only by acquiring secret knowledge that only sophisticated men like themselves possessed. In the 1960s, many of them took it upon themselves to “modernize” the Mass as devoutly prayed by Catholics for 1700 years, allegedly to make it simpler for the common man to understand. Common Catholics had no interest in this idea—only gnostics would.

“But they convinced the Church to simplify the Mass and replace the universal and unchanging Latin language with the everyday vernacular.

“Many of them encouraged the faithful to believe that like the Mass, the Truth itself could be changed—continually. The modern gnostic priests and bishops could not leave even the simplified Mass alone. They would alter the words and movements to suit their own beliefs and enthusiasms of the moment—to the point where, in many cases, it ceased to be the sacrifice of the Mass at all! They were also, by their visible improvisations, encouraging the people to look at the deposit of Faith that had come down to them from God Himself on a par with their daily whims and feelings. In their hands, for millions of Catholics, Mass became a slightly theatrical, humanistic talkfest. It was not Catholic, but neo-Catholic.

“And who would die for that? It’s one thing for you and your neighbors to offer your lives to defend the One True Faith. But would I die to defend my neighbors’ whims of the day? I don’t even know what they are.

“In school, I learned the Truth men died for: If the Holy Eucharist should fall to the floor, the priest must first go down on his knees and lick the stone where it fell. Then he must take a special chisel and reduce the surface the Eucharist touched into dust. And then he must gather this dust… In short, there is a lot he must do. All this will not seem like idiocy to him under only one condition: The priest must believe that he is not handling a wafer, but the Body of Christ. If he thinks they’re wafers, or something like the Body of Christ, or the symbolic body of Christ, he can simply scoop it up and drop it in his pocket, and then calmly walk on the same spot where it fell, as gnostic, neo-Catholic priests did for seventy years. Even more interesting—after a month, they threw the leftover, consecrated ‘wafers’ away. Imagine, the leftover body of Christ!

“Would anyone volunteer to die for a wafer he throws from the chalice into the trash? When the real enemy arrived, who considered only himself to be of the true faith and the Catholic liberals to be fools, no one wanted to die. Instead of them, the visible Catholic Church on earth died.”

Eugène-Olivier quietly, but firmly objected. “I would not say that no one wanted to die. My grandfather… He was… Our family have always been altar servers at Notre Dame. He was killed when the Wahhabis came to occupy the church. He died for Notre Dame. The priest had run away.”

“So you are the grandson of a martyr? You are fortunate. He is praying for you.”

“But Grandfather was a, what did you call them? A Neo-Catholic. He attended the short Mass which was not in Latin, and he almost certainly accepted the Eucharist in his hand.”

“He is a martyr. The rest is not important. Ordinary people are not the ones to decide how to behave with respect to the Eucharist or what the Mass should be like. All the responsibility lies with the clergy. After all, the Lord gave your grandfather courage, and not the priest. Yet the number of those like your grandfather was small, very small. A careless attitude toward the Eucharist destroyed the faith of millions or billions. That, and failure to honor the fasts. It was too great a challenge for the souls of ordinary people.”

The handcar rushed through the darkness. The rays from the flashlight slid too quickly to be able to show anything clearly.

“Wait, Father Lothaire!” Something suddenly occurred to Eugène-Olivier. “How old are you?”

“I’m thirty-three.”

“How were you able to complete your seminary studies?”

The priest laughed.

“Oh, I managed to finish an entire year normally. Only because the seminary was not neo-Catholic. The rest were all closed two years before. I managed to find the Flavigny Seminary, a wonderful place. There was a monastery there going back to the time of Charles Martel. Imagine—I lived within walls that remembered a time when France was not yet called the ‘favorite daughter of the church,’ because she had yet to earn that title. Even the stones remembered, I felt. I was your age—when one’s inner ear hears these things very clearly.

“The walls of our seminary were actually in their second life: At the end of the twentieth century, no one needed an ancient monastery. These walls had been offered for sale, and were bought for the Society of St. Pius X, so that they would keep speaking to young men like me who were studying for the priesthood. Men in their first three years of study were housed in Flavigny and the older students at Ecône Seminary in Switzerland.”

Father Lothaire fell silent as he remembered when he returned home a few months after receiving his cassock. In the room where he had grown up—but which now seemed alien to him—the unkempt teddy bear he had slept with in his childhood sat on the bed. His mother had dressed him in a new cassock with a clerical collar! Lothaire closed the door and then took the teddy bear in his arms: “Yes, brother, both of us are too old-fashioned for the times.”

How proud he had been of his first floor-length cassock—and how uncomfortable it was! It made it especially difficult to play football.

“Either it will be your only clothing or you will never feel comfortable in it!” old Abbot Florian, who had met Lefebvre himself, used to tell them.

The third-year men teased the younger ones that they would have to climb mountains in their cassocks during their trip to the Alps.

Life unfolded according to medieval custom. No cell phones. Internet only in the library. A narrow cell—reminiscent of a room in a bad hotel. It didn’t really have four walls. Lined up in a row, there were a desk, a chair, a bed, a small wardrobe, and a small sink. At the ends were “walls” just wide enough for the window on one side and the door on the other.

They were not allowed to keep food in their cells—not even coffee cans or tea bags. Philippe Quimbert, his colleague, had the good fortune to be under doctor’s orders to drink tea, which he was allowed to have any time—but he could not bring the teapot into his cell!

The cell was so small that two men in it would have gotten in each other’s way. But two men were not allowed to be in a cell at the same time in any case. The rules of monastic life were not written by fools.

There were wonderful books at the seminary. But at least one discipline could not be learned from books. It was Practical Liturgics—how to offer the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Finding himself in the miniature hall for the first time, Father Lothaire thought he had entered a little closet chapel. But why was it necessary to lock it with seven locks so that, God forbid, an ordinary man could not enter? Why not? It simply contained an altar, a tabernacle, candles—everything necessary for the service.

The room was called Bluebeard’s Chamber. It was in fact a false altar. The chalice was not real. The tabernacle was empty. The chapel was a toy, a training device.

“Thurible higher, thurible lower! No, not there, first down! Too broad a sweep. Again!”

“Oremus.”

“No, again!”

“Oremus.”

“Again!”

“Oremus.”

And so on, twenty times.

Everything else could be learned later from books: theoretical liturgics and homiletics; dogmatic and moral theology; Latin, ancient Greek. But no book could refine the movement of hands and the swing of the thurible, or teach you to straighten your back and even your step.

How good it was, that he had had at least that one year at the seminary. It was like a soldier’s first year, when all strength is directed toward the renunciation of one’s own will. What monotony, what difficult prose filled the days of these keepers of the Holy Grail! Romanticism spends itself quickly. It was said that every year, fifteen to twenty students enrolled at Flavigny, and that every year five to ten graduated from Ecône.

The day began with Mass. Then a long rite with prayers of the Holy Fathers. Fifteen minutes before lunch, the rector would give the sign to stop reading. That meant the men could chat with a glass of red wine. But those fifteen minutes were not the only ones for chatting during the day. Immediately after lunch, an hour was dedicated to walking around together in the monastery garden. You could walk alone perhaps once or twice.

If you walked alone every day, the moderator soon summoned you: “A priest must be open toward others. This time is dedicated to socializing,” Abbot Florian would say.

Father Lothaire was reminded that the Abbot was killed five years ago in Picardie.

But after Compline, from nine o’clock in the evening onwards, there was no socializing. A “great silence” was in effect until morning. It was forbidden to speak. During Great Lent, this was frequently extended for a whole day. During the “great silence,” even those on duty in the kitchen communicated only by signals. You turned a potato in your hand, holding an invisible knife in your other hand, as in, “Where is it?” A nod of the head in the direction of a drawer: “It’s there.”

It wasn’t really a barracks. In a barracks, no one cares about your inner life or whether you are spending your breaks alone or with just one particular colleague—which was also considered not good at the seminary.

Lothaire turned out well. He was chosen from among a small number. There was one bitterness that poisoned his days: There were too few chosen. From five to ten priests per year—for all of Europe! And sometimes they had to be shared with Asia, which always provoked discontent.

“At six in the morning I serve Mass in Saint-Quentin,” complained an old abbot. “Then I jump into my car and hurry to serve another Mass in Guise. From there, I rush to Laon, and it’s good if by the grace of God I manage to at least start liturgy before noon. In Laon, I have breakfast, even though, to be honest, getting from Guise to Laon without a cup of coffee is really difficult. But young people should not comfort their consciences that this slavish form of life means that their work is so much in demand. All this travel is not because there are too many of the faithful, but because there are too few. There are too few Catholics, and there are even fewer of us, who are their shepherds.”

What could one do? Lothaire was up to the challenge. He was ready for the many sufferings of which the abbot warned him. (What was it that they called him? Abbot Bailiff!—and many other names.) Lothaire was prepared for the fact that he would probably have to serve in an old barn and that on his way there he would pass a magnificent Baroque chapel turned into a tourist center with a museum and a souvenir shop or, even more painful, a Pseudo-Gothic or Neoclassical church “without architectural or historical value” that had been converted into a mosque “to meet the needs of the local population.” He had been prepared, and he was ready.

But no one was ready for what interrupted his studies.

Government troops surrounded Flavigny during Mass so that no one would detect them. But what would have changed if the seminary family had noticed before the soldiers spread out into the cells, the passages, the halls? They could have barricaded themselves and survived a few days under siege. But it wouldn’t have served any purpose. The press wouldn’t have reacted.

The faithful would have come, it’s true. They would have camped around them—with their children, with crosses, with icons. God forbid, someone would have been killed. Flavigny was liquidated by government decree, and the army that closed it was at that time two-thirds Muslim and one-third non-religious French. The latter viewed the seminary students dressed in cassocks as exotic savages, and they openly made fun of them.

While the professor patiently packed the liturgical items, trying to prevent them from falling into profane hands, one of the deacons sent Lothaire to find some empty boxes and rope. Remembering that these were stored in a closet on the second floor, Lothaire hurried up the steps. The door to Bluebeard’s chamber was wide open. There were two young soldiers—French, they were certainly French—in charge there. One sat on the floor drinking Coca-Cola from the chalice; the empty bottle stood next to him. The other man was turning the tabernacle from the training altar over in his hands with curiosity.

Entering the hall, Lothaire could not refrain from laughing. These young men imagined they were destroying the chapel.

“What are you laughing at?” asked one of the soldiers in surprise, reluctantly moving his feet. “What’s so funny, abbot?”

“I’m not an abbot yet.” Lothaire pointed a fist (which as yet bore no ordination ring) toward the weak jaw of the soldier with satisfaction, “but you are a complete idiot.”

His year in Flavigny—thirteen months to be exact, had really been too short.

“We need to get off here and switch to another track,” said the priest. Eugène-Olivier was not the only one who knew his way around the underground.

Their journey through the darkness continued uneventfully. But Eugène-Olivier Lévêque had never felt so bad and so sad in his life. Perhaps it was because he had been doing something he had never done before: imagining that he was Muslim. Not a Muslim of the present day, but one of those shahids who were so numerous at the turn of the century, when this was their method of establishing rule over half of the world:

He and his band would invade a children’s kindergarten during some jolly feast day, such as a non-fasting Tuesday when children were enthusiastically drawing cornucopias for each other, dancing, and eating small cakes. Once the children were hostages, it would be published by the willing media that for every wounded shahid, they would kill three or five children, depending on the number they had managed to capture.

Then they would set conditions which, if unmet, they threatened would result in the killing of more children—for example, abolishing the law that prohibited the wearing of the chador.

To move the media-watchers from fear to panic, they would slaughter a child before the eyes of the other children—who were too afraid even to cry. Then they would set free another child hostage and send him out the door of the kindergarten holding a photo showing a close-up of the dead innocent’s body.

Concessions to the Muslim terrorists were always given, but it always turned out that concessions bought nothing. Every agreement painstakingly negotiated with the terrorists would be inoperative once all the hostages were freed or killed. The terrorists had just one goal—to intimidate, to break.

After the first two or three hostage-takings, our grandfathers and grandmothers would beg the government to stop placing the lives of their children at risk: Let the Muslim women go to school dressed any way they liked…

Think about this: It is for this that young Muslim men are ready to die. Some of them are high on energy drinks, but more or less conscious and ready. That one over there, splattered with the blood of a child, makes a phone call to the Emirates and says goodbye to his mother, tells her he is going to meet Allah. She blesses him and tells him she has already invited the guests to “his wedding with the raven-haired maidens of Heaven.” Finally, he falls among the bodies of his victims. And then? Is there anything after that?

When the raven-haired succubi come out to meet him, do they talk first, or cut to the chase? Do they even know how to talk? What would they talk about, since they aren’t human? It is only sex, only red mouth, only white hands—two white, ghostly white, moon-like hands, hands that squeeze… The hands aren’t living. Therefore, they are dead.

“We’re here,” said Father Lothaire.