Marie de l’Incarnation

There is one interesting, nearly universal feature of the demonstrations in Canada for political freedom. The members — called a “small fringe minority” by our prime minister — would seem to be almost entirely Christian. They are also patriotic, as is evident even to legacy media, who feel compelled to use photographs and footage, and thus to admit a fragment of the truth. Canadian flags are exhibited on the grilles of the honking trucks, and generally.

Indeed, a Globe reporter has tweeted that she is now traumatized by this experience, of being confronted by Canadian flags. She gags at what I used to call the “Pearson pennant.” (It is only in the last few weeks, that I have ceased to be “traumatized” by it, myself; though truth to tell, I got over the worst of this trauma by deep breathing, about 1965.)

But the Christian attachments, among the protestors, is not waved about as a flag. It is expressed mostly in prayers, the articulation of blessings, singing “Amazing Grace,” and in subtle decorations worn close to head and heart, that may be illegal in Quebec.

Afghanistan is governed differently from Canada, but the ruling party (the Taliban, not the Liberals as here) has much the same attitude towards Christians. I noticed this when my attention turned from Marie de l’Incarnation, this morning, to the World Watch List of the humanitarian organization, Open Doors.

We do not know, or cannot know yet, how many Christian men have been murdered for their faith in Afghanistan; or how many of the women and girls have been raped, and forcibly converted, &c. We only know that the Taliban have been able to identify such people with the help of fairly good information from the records of United States foreign aid and military organizations, left behind when their keepers fled the country.

While the slaughter of Christians is not, to my knowledge, yet a commonplace in “the true north strong and free,” attacks on churches have now overtaken. Fourteen churches were destroyed in the Islamic world, last year, according to the Open Doors report (and many more monastic and religious sites), but I think none of these had been established in Afghanistan. Sixteen is the number of Canadian churches recently lost to violence, especially arson attacks; and by my informal count there have been more than sixty attempts to destroy or profane them. Approximately none of these have been prosecuted by Canadian police, who know on what side their political bread is buttered. They nevertheless continue to arrest priests and other Christians for defying Batflu regulations.

The excuse for this violence is more or less typical of liberal bilge. “Thousands” of children’s unmarked graves are claimed to have been discovered by Indian racial activists in the vicinity of former residential schools. But zero is the number of bodies that has been exhumed, and permission is not granted for competent investigation of any of these (obviously fraudulent) “genocide” claims.

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Reading, the letters to her son back in France, of Marie de l’Incarnation, from roughly four centuries ago — when the white population of Quebec was about two hundred and fifty souls. To the cold winter imagination, one summons her first creation of a hospital, and of a first (“residential”?) school for girls. This was to serve not only the citizens of New France, but the Montagnais, Hurons, and Algonquins. I am reminded that Marie’s Ursuline sisters were, even more than Cartier and Champlain, the reason Canada became Catholic in its heart; why Indian converts were, in the secret annals of our consciousness, probably more significant than the European immigrants — in Christianizing the land, in making it sacred.

For three or four centuries we remained indisputably Christian. What we are now, you would have to ask the Devil.