The Mosque of Notre Dame

by Elena Chudinova

  “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 fro
m 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.”