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"Who would have dared think that a hundred years after France led Europe into its secularist blind alley, that a French president would sound the call to a kind of spiritual recalibration of Europe?"
REPORTER’S NOTE: As editor of "La Liste d'Elie" (the French version of the Elijah List) and a descendent of French Huguenots, I am fascinated with both French history and the destiny God has for France. Traditionally a Catholic country, France has often been accused of reaping what it sowed during the horrific religious wars against the Huguenots in the 16th and 17th centuries. Protestant vs. Catholic theology aside, President Sarkozy's attempts to restore religious freedom and respect for Christians in France is as historic as it is remarkable. Please join with believers in France in praying for an end to the secular stranglehold over their nation and the beginning of revival and restoration. –Teresa Neumann, BCN.
(Washington, D.C.)—Robert Royal, president of the Faith & Reason Institute in Washington, D.C., has written an op/ed for First Things - The Journal of Religion, Culture, and Public Life, detailing the significant changes he believes President Sarkozy is capable of making in France.
Royal begins: "A few years ago, I was in the middle of giving a lecture in Paris about religious persecution and martyrdom during the twentieth century when a woman stood up and shouted, 'The French state has been repressing and killing Christians ever since the Revolution—and it has to stop!'...it immediately struck me that she had given voice to a feeling of religious disenfranchisement in France that we almost never hear about."
Referring to Sarkozy's book, La Republique, les religions, et l'esperance, Royal notes that he was struck by the president's belief that French citizens have to learn to talk about religion in public again and also his willingness even to raise questions about the antireligious laws of 1905 that abolished some religious orders and confiscated religious property.
During his visit to Rome and the Vatican in December, Sarkozy also daringly said that the Church in France has “to be more courageous” in intervening publicly because the French Republic has need of people of faith and that the "present and future depend on a more inclusive embrace of the past."
Enumerating the contributions of French believers in the arts, intellectual and spiritual life (such as Couperin, Péguy, Pascal, Bossuet, Claudel, Bernanos, Poulenc, Messiaen, Maritain, Mounier, de Lubac, and René Girard, Bernard of Clairvaux, Saint Louis, Bernadette of Lourdes, Thérèse of Lisieux, Charles de Foucauld, John Vianney, and others), Sarkozy concluded, "Those are the facts. The roots of France are essentially Christian. I fully embrace France’s past and that special link that has long united our nation to the Church.”
"Who would have dared think that a hundred years after France led Europe into its secularist blind alley," muses Royal, "that a French president would sound the call to a kind of spiritual recalibration of Europe?"
Used by Permission Breaking Christian News www.breakingchristiannews.com
Source: Robert Royal - First Things www.firstthings.com
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