EDITORIAL

Could we suffer France's fate?

In France, rioting on a massive scale spread to more than 300 cities as thousands of cars were torched, along with nursery schools and, in one particularly grisly incident, a handicapped woman.

The riots shone a spotlight on the Muslim neighborhoods that France has virtually abandoned.

How bad is it? A firsthand account of life in a Muslim slum was a French bestseller in 2002. It was called Dans l’enfer des tournantes (In Gang Rape Hell). “It recounts the life of a courageous French Muslim teenager, Samira Bellil, who was repeatedly gang-raped, and in order to survive became a racaille (hooligan), beating up other girls to get protection and respect,” said reporter Olivier Guitta.

The book is a realistic account of life there, said Guitta. “The culture of violence is reinforced on every side, by the anti-police, anti-West gangsta rap kids listen to, and by the blogs where young thugs parade their exploits of arson or mugging at gunpoint, thereby becoming neighborhood ‘stars’ and raising the stakes for other gangs.”

How is such a thing possible in modern, enlightened France?

George Weigel may have given us a clue earlier this year. In his book The Cube and the Cathedral, Weigel describes a trip he took to Paris in 1997. He visited La Grande Arche de la Défense, a gigantic cube-shaped structure made of glass and marble. It houses the International Foundation for Human Rights.

Weigel noticed that his guidebook pointed out that the cube is large enough to contain the Cathedral of Notre Dame. France seems eager to trump its old Catholic culture with its new, secular one.

“Which culture, I wondered, would better protect human rights?” wrote Weigel. “Which culture would more firmly secure the moral foundations of democracy? The culture that built this stunning, rational, angular, geometrically precise but essentially featureless cube? Or the culture that produced the vaulting and bosses, the gargoyles and flying buttresses, the nooks and crannies, the asymmetries and holy ‘unsameness’ of Notre-Dame and the other great Gothic cathedrals of Europe?”

His book suggests that the culture built by the Church is more likely to protect Europeans’ human rights. As Weigel put it in a recent talk in New York:

Europe is “in the midst of depopulating itself and having that demographic vacuum filled by people from another cultural experience, who in some instances take a very aggressive stance toward the host culture in which they find themselves. That kind of cultural transformation … if successful, would mean the end of, or at least the severe attenuation of, Europe's commitments to human rights, democracy, the rule of law, civility and tolerance.”

As riots enflame France, Weigel's words look prophetic.

France is the nation that led the charge in keeping Europe's Christian roots out of the EU's constitution. France is the nation that believes that its Catholic past is a hindrance to its future flourishing. Yet this same France has utterly failed to inculcate human rights, democracy, the rule of law, civility and tolerance in its people. Why?

Because each of those concepts originated in a world that was committed to Christ and had learned about him from the Church.

We learned to appreciate human rights because the Church taught that God became man out of love for every human being. Where religion was strong enough to inculcate people with the virtues they needed to govern themselves, democracy flowered. Those who learned that Christ himself was obedient respected the rule of law; those who learned Christ's Golden Rule honored civility and tolerance.

If we turn away from God the way Europe has, expect the same decline here. Ask Mar Del Plata, Argentina.

As Paris burned, some 10,000 protesters descended on the small town to protest President Bush's visit, egged on by Church foe Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. Protesters carried peace slogans, sharp sticks and American flags to set on fire. They pelted police with stones, broke open store fronts, looted and set a bank on fire as the town's elderly and children fled.

This should come as no surprise. Christianity built the best virtues of the West. Where faith is in decline, Western virtues will be in decline — and hate will be on the rise.

To compare Weigel's two symbols again, the biggest difference between the cube and the cathedral isn't the shape of the buildings — it's what's inside. The cathedral houses Christ himself in the Eucharist. Its architecture functions the way a tabernacle does — it is meant to draw our attention to something deeper. The cube, of course, is empty, and draws our attention to that emptiness.

In America, which symbol will prevail?