Un bien triste jour pour la liberté d'expression en Europe

Le pasteur baptiste Elder Scott devant son temple. Nous conseillons vivement à ce gibier de potence de ne pas se rendre en Angleterre y prêcher la bonne parole. Il risque de se retrouver derrière les barreaux. Une photo de Schmoe Scott.

La France est un des pays développés où la liberté d'expression est la plus restreinte. Non seulement par la pression sociale ou le terrorisme intellectuel, mais tout simplement par la loi. Dans ce beau pays, le simple fait d'exprimer publiquement des opinions peut conduire directement à la case prison. Les récentes expériences vécues par le journaliste Eric Zemmour en témoignent.

Pourtant, un article du Telegraph de ce matin nous prouve que nos voisins anglais nous suivent de très près quand ils ne nous précèdent pas d'une tête.

Dale McAlpine, prêcheur baptiste faisant du proslytisme sur la voie publique a été arrêté par la police pour avoir mentionné à une passante que l'homosexualité est un péché.

Après avoir entendu que la Bible liste l'homosexualité parmi les conduites répréhensibles, la passante s'est empressée de rejoindre un policier qui par hasard se trouve être homosexuel et agent de liaison entre la police et les communautés gaies, lesbiennes, bisexuelles et transexuelles.

L'agent de police au titre du quota a interpellé à son tour le prédicateur et appelé des renforts lesquels ont arêté et inculpé le baptiste pour atteinte à l'ordre public.

Je suis enclin à penser que ce courageux paladin des communautés gaies, lesbiennes, bisexuelles et transexuelles se serait bien gardé d'intervenir si au lieu d'être baptiste, le prédicateur avait été musulman.

Christian preacher arrested for saying homosexuality is a sin

A Christian street preacher was arrested and locked in a cell for telling a passer-by that homosexuality is a sin in the eyes of God.


Dale McAlpine was charged with causing “harassment, alarm or distress” after a homosexual police community support officer (PCSO) overheard him reciting a number of “sins” referred to in the Bible, including blasphemy, drunkenness and same sex relationships.

The 42-year-old Baptist, who has preached Christianity in Wokington, Cumbria for years, said he did not mention homosexuality while delivering a sermon from the top of a stepladder, but admitted telling a passing shopper that he believed it went against the word of God.

Police officers are alleging that he made the remark in a voice loud enough to be overheard by others and have charged him with using abusive or insulting language, contrary to the Public Order Act.
Mr McAlpine, who was taken to the police station in the back of a marked van and locked in a cell for seven hours on April 20, said the incident was among the worst experiences of his life.
“I felt deeply shocked and humiliated that I had been arrested in my own town and treated like a common criminal in front of people I know," he said.
“My freedom was taken away on the hearsay of someone who disliked what I said, and I was charged under a law that doesn't apply.”
Christian campaigners have expressed alarm that the Public Order Act, introduced in 1986 to tackle violent rioters and football hooligans, is being used to curb religious free speech.
Sam Webster, a solicitor-advocate for the Christian Institute, which is supporting Mr McAlpine, said it is not a crime to express the belief that homosexual conduct is a sin.
“The police have a duty to maintain public order but they also have a duty to defend the lawful free speech of citizens,” he said.

Sam Adams, le policier qui a fait arrêter le prêcheur baptiste. Plus de détails dans un article du Daily Mail.

“Case law has ruled that the orthodox Christian belief that homosexual conduct is sinful is a belief worthy of respect in a democratic society."
Mr McAlpine was handing out leaflets explaining the Ten Commandments or offering a “ticket to heaven” with a church colleague on April 20, when a woman came up and engaged him in a debate about his faith.
During the exchange, he says he quietly listed homosexuality among a number of sins referred to in 1 Corinthians, including blasphemy, fornication, adultery and drunkenness.
After the woman walked away, she was approached by a PCSO who spoke with her briefly and then walked over to Mr McAlpine and told him a complaint had been made, and that he could be arrested for using racist or homophobic language.
The street preacher said he told the PCSO: “I am not homophobic but sometimes I do say that the Bible says homosexuality is a crime against the Creator”.
He claims that the PCSO then said he was homosexual and identified himself as the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender liaison officer for Cumbria police. Mr McAlpine replied: “It’s still a sin.”
The preacher then began a 20 minute sermon, in which he says he mentioned drunkenness and adultery, but not homosexuality. Three regular uniformed police officers arrived during the address, arrested Mr McAlpine and put him in the back of a police van.
At the station, he was told to empty his pockets and his mobile telephone, belt and shoes were confiscated. Police took fingerprints, a palm print, a retina scan and a DNA swab.
He was later interviewed, charged under Sections 5 (1) and (6) of the Public Order Act and released on bail on the condition that he did not preach in public.
Mr McAlpine pleaded not guilty at a preliminary hearing on Friday at Wokingham magistrates court and is now awaiting a trial date.
The Public Order Act, which outlaws the unreasonable use of abusive language likely to cause distress, has been used to arrest religious people in a number of similar cases.
Harry Hammond, a pensioner, was convicted under Section 5 of the Act in 2002 for holding up a sign saying “Stop immorality. Stop Homosexuality. Stop Lesbianism. Jesus is Lord” while preaching in Bournemouth.
Stephen Green, a Christian campaigner, was arrested and charged in 2006 for handing out religious leaflets at a Gay Pride festival in Cardiff. The case against him was later dropped.
Cumbria police said last night that no one was available to comment on Mr McAlpine’s case.

Un effort commun

Jésus devant son juge juif.

Dans le dialogue entre le catholicisme et le judaïsme, une des revendications les plus permanentes des Juifs est la modification des prières et textes rituels catholiques appelant à la conversion des israélites ou les blâmant pour la mort du Christ.

Depuis Pie XII, l'Eglise a répondu favorablement à ces demandes et a largement modifié les prières dans le sens demandé par la communauté juive.

En revanche, le judaïsme ne semble pas percevoir qu'il pourrait lui aussi faire preuve d'un peu plus de sensibilité à l'égard des catholiques et prendre ses distances quant aux textes talmudiques les plus férocement antichrétiens.

Dans l'hebdomadaire juif Forward, Jay Michaelson a écrit un remarquable article sur cette question difficile et sur l'attitude des Juifs à l'égard d'un des leurs, le Christ.

Do Jews Have a Jesus Problem? The joke, if that’s what it is, goes like this: “You’ll have to forgive us Jews for being a little nervous. Two thousand years of Christian love have worn down our nerves.”
Shalom Rabbi: Jesus sits before Caiphas, the Roman-appointed Jewish high priest.
That says it all, doesn’t it? The scars of antisemitism and missionary activity, the pathos-drenched sense of humor, the contempt for Christianity — this is certainly how I regarded our local majority religion as I was growing up. When I was a child, Christianity was like the big, stupid bully: at once idiotic, and overwhelmingly powerful. Couldn’t they see how ridiculous their religion was? A virgin birth? Santa Claus? An Easter Bunny? A messiah who got killed, but actually died for our sins? And yet, these were the people running our country, telling us which days we get off from school and which we don’t, and playing their insidious music every winter.

If the books the Forward receives for review are any indication, I am not alone in my neurosis about Yeshu ben Yoseph. Though nothing, it seems, will match the never-ending torrent of books about the Holocaust, these past few years have seen a small mountain of Jesus books arrive on my desk, most of them not worthy of review. Screeds about how Jesus got Judaism wrong, or how Christians got Jesus wrong, or how much better we are than they are — these are books my younger self would have written.

Surely, some of the Jesus fad is due to the success of David Klinghoffer’s 2005 book, “Why the Jews Rejected Jesus.” (Answer: We’re the chosen people — a nation, not universalists.) But I think a lot of it is also due to our increased confidence as an assimilated minority in the United States. Where once we could have been tortured or burned for not accepting Christ, now we can publish books criticizing him.

It was not always thus. Indeed, the texts discussed in the best book of the recent crop, Peter Schafer’s “Jesus in the Talmud,” were once considered so outrageous that they were self-censored from European editions of the Talmud. Not that the attempt succeeded: Christian authorities burned the Talmud anyway, and antisemitism continued unabated. But the censorship did succeed somewhat; these texts are practically unknown even today.

And they are still somewhat scandalous. What Schafer shows is that the rabbis of the Talmud knew the New Testament well enough to parody it and were concerned enough about the growth of the Jewish-Christian sect to condemn the testament. And they did so in unsparing terms.

The image of Jesus that one gets from the Talmud is that of an illicit, sex-crazed black magician who uses trickery to lead Israel astray. In BT Sanhedrin 103a, Jesus is depicted as a poor disciple who “spoiled his food,” which Schafer speculates may be a euphemism for sexual misconduct: “to eat the dish” being a recognized Talmudic euphemism known for the sex act itself. A later emendation adds that he “practiced magic and led Israel astray.” And the virgin birth is ridiculed as a cover-up of Jesus’ true parentage: His mother was an “illicit woman” (another Talmudic locution), perhaps even a prostitute.

Strong stuff — no wonder they don’t teach it in Sunday school. But fascinating, as well, as long as, of course, we don’t take it too seriously (which, doubtless, some Jews do). The texts Schafer adduces — all of them relatively late, dating to the third- or fourth-century C.E., suggesting a conscious effort to fight the upstart sect — show that the Talmudic rabbis did not reject Jesus for the noble reasons that Klinghoffer and his ilk suggest. At least according to these texts, they rejected him because they thought he was evil, or saw him as a threat.

The most notorious of all the “Jesus texts,” however, is BT Sanhedrin 43a, which describes the halachic procedure of Jesus’ trial and execution. This is notorious, of course, because for nearly 2,000 years, Christian authorities have been blaming the Jews for killing Jesus, even though the New Testament itself makes clear that it’s the Romans who actually did the deed.

Shockingly, however, the Talmud does not shirk responsibility for Jesus’ death. On the contrary, it says that he deserved it and that the Jews did it themselves. Jesus was, the text relates, a sorcerer, an idolater and a heretic who led Israel to idolatry. His conviction was entirely just, and his execution — stoning and then hanging — was carried out in strict accordance with rabbinic law.

Why would the Talmud make such a claim? Schafer speculates it is to undermine the Gospels’ account and empower the rabbis. In the Gospels’ account, the rabbis are tools, almost, of Rome. In the Talmud’s account, they are powerful — so powerful that they condemned the hero of the Christian sect to his brutal death. (Believe it or not, there are actually even more graphic texts, which Schafer includes in his book. Suffice to say, their gruesome account of hell puts even Dante to shame. But I’ll leave that out of this family newspaper.)

What’s fascinating about reading these texts together with Schafer’s careful and thorough commentary is that the ambivalence about Jesus, which I experienced as a young man, seems to be already in place back in the fourth century. On the one hand, Jesus is beneath contempt. On the other, he is dangerously powerful. These texts were written before the church became the most powerful force on Earth, but they wouldn’t be out of place among the books I chose not to include here.

Indeed, I’m sure that there are some readers who may have preferred these comments not be published at all. The texts in Schafer’s book are still dangerous. They still might incite violence against Jews. And they threaten decades of progress in Jewish-Christian relations.

One wonders when, if ever, we Jews will be able to heal from the trauma of Christian oppression and actually learn from, while still differentiating ourselves from, Christian teaching and tradition. Along my own spiritual path, I’ve been amazed at how much I learn from the teachings of other traditions — Buddhism, Hinduism, Paganism, Sufism — yet how jittery I get when it comes to Christianity. Yes, like many Jews, I have an appreciation for the teachings of Jesus, and I even wrote my master’s thesis on Paul and the Talmud. But this isn’t enough. I want to understand Christ the way Christians do — not to become one of them, but in order to enrich my own religious life. I want to learn from them how to have a personal relationship with a personal, humanized, embodied God who cares, and who saves. I want to experience Jesus as a human being enlightened enough to see everyone as holy, even the impure, the leprous and the marginalized. And I want to follow his example, seeing all my fellow human beings and myself as sons and daughters of God.

Four years ago, I developed some of these thoughts in an essay in Zeek magazine. I playfully titled the piece “How I Finally Came To Accept Christ in My Heart,” explaining the irony in the first paragraph. At a conference where the magazines were for sale, someone saw that title, took the entire stack of magazines and threw it on the floor, proceeding to scream at the bookseller for selling missionary trash.

Well, I guess you’ll have to forgive us Jews for still being a little nervous…

Le Christ débarque à Malaga

Dans le cadre des célébrations de la Semaine sainte, la Légion étrangère espagnole participe aux processions  avec son Christ de la bonne mort.

On voit ici les légionnaires transportant à Malaga un Christ sur la croix à dos d'homme.

Les chrétiens sont-ils résignés ?

La résignation dans la culture catholique en France (1870-1945) Jean-François Galinier-Pallerola
Cerf histoire, 500 p., notes, sources, biblio., index, 49 e,
ISBN 978-2-204-08285-3.


Grosse pointure de l'histoire religieuse, professeur émérite à l'université Paul Valéry de Montpellier, co-auteur avec Yves-Marie Hilaire de l'Histoire religieuse de la France contemporaine, l'abbé Galinier-Pallerola s'attaque à la résignation dans la culture catholique. Il s’agit d’un sujet qui a nourri les polémistes anti-chrétiens tout au long du XIXe siècle. Ces critiques qui, comme Nietzsche ou Marx, l'accusent de diffuser un amour morbide de la souffrance, de propager une éthique fondée sur la culpabilité qui aboutit au rabaissement de la valeur de la vie et de l'image du monde réel.
Or, on cherche en vain la résignation par les vertus enseignées par l'Eglise actuelle. Le mot est absent des grands opus qui servent de référence aux croyants. Pourtant, la résignation, subtil mélange d'obéissance, d'abandon et de patience, était au cœur de la spiritualité catholique au XIXe siècle. Que s'est-il donc passé ?
Pour répondre à cette question, l'auteur ne se contente pas de cribler les écrits des papes et les positions officielles de l'Eglise de France, mais il s'immerge dans un corpus bien plus vaste et beaucoup plus difficile à épuiser, celui de la culture catholique au sens large, reflet du vécu spirituel (et temporel) des croyants.
On imagine l'abbé Galinier-Pallerola multipliant les notes au fil de ses lectures, assemblant patiemment le puzzle de sa démonstration et condensant le tout en un peu moins de 500 pages. Dans un texte nourri, solidement charpenté, l'auteur démontre que le chrétien hésite entre deux pôles que l'on pourrait illustrer d'un côté par la figure du Christ sur la croix et le Christ ressuscité. Ces références appartiennent l'une comme l'autre au christianisme, mais leur prégnance sur la pratique et les mentalités varient en fonction du vécu collectif des catholiques.
Les chrétiens vont lire avec profit cet ouvrage qui les aide à comprendre des aspects de leur foi qui suscitent de l’incompréhension du croyant contemporain. Les autres, pourront mieux replacer les polémiques anti-chrétiennes dans leur contexte et comprendre que bien des arguments des contempteurs de l’Evangile reposent sur une méconnaissance de l’Evangile.

La diffusion initiale du christianisme

Histoire du catéchuménat
dans l'église ancienne

Paul L. Gavriluyk

Cerf, 400 p., notes, sources, biblio., 39 e,
ISBN 978-2-204-08328-7.


Comment devenait-on chrétien dans l'Antiquité ? Tel est le sujet de cet ouvrage passionnant consacré à une des périodes clef de l'histoire du christianisme et pourtant largement méconnue. L'auteur est un théologien russe, professeur à l'université de Saint-Thomas à Saint-Paul dans le Minnesota. Concernant un moment de l'histoire quand les Eglises d'Orient et d'Occident étaient unies, ces travaux d'un orthodoxe acquièrent un intérêt supplémentaire pour un lecteur catholique. Avant la naissance du Christ, les Juifs pratiquaient un modeste prosélytisme. Prudent et exigeant, le processus juif de conversion demandait aux impétrants qu'ils embrassent à la totalité de l'enseignement de la Thora. On peine à imaginer la difficulté de l'exercice. Abandonner une foi païenne pour adhérer au judaïsme était bien plus qu'un changement de chapelle, il impliquait pour le converti l’abandon de sa nation, le bouleversement de son système de valeurs et de ses usages les plus intimes, sans oublier la coupure avec sa famille, ses amis et ses responsabilités sociales. Le Christ change radicalement cette perspective en abolissant la distinction essentielle entre le Juif et le non-Juif. Le Christ ne discrimine plus entre Juifs et non-Juifs, tous sont enfants de Dieu. Désormais le païen est admis à recevoir l'enseignement de la Thora. Dès lors, le cheminement de la conversion cesse d'être exceptionnel pour devenir une démarche normalisée. Le premier concile de l'Eglise universelle, celui des Apôtres, décida que pour la faciliter, la circoncision et le respect de toutes les obligations rituelles n’étaient pas un devoir pour les convertis.Cette concession a permis l'expansion du christianisme en donnant une dimension bien réelle à son universalisme.
D'une lecture agréable, bien traduit, cet ouvrage éclaire d'un jour nouveau la diffusion du christianisme et ne manque pas d'apporter d'utiles arguments à différents débats plus actuels, notamment celui du dialogue avec les Juifs et celui de la prise en compte de la déchristianisation du monde moderne. Des notes, des sources et une riche bibliographie ouvrent d'utiles perspectives au lecteur curieux.