Paris death salon shows life and new trends in funeral industry
“Care to try out the coffin?” Surprised but intrigued, the young man lays himself down on the ivory satin fabric and holds his breath as the heavy lid closes over him. At the Salon of Death, everything is permitted.
For the first time in Paris, death is the star at a free exhibition taking place underneath the famed Louvre museum.
“It’s good to talk about death in the heart of the capital, because we’re a society pretty much based on consumption and leisure,” said Jean-Paul Soltani, who makes funerary monuments in the northwestern region of Brittany. “And here, we’re right next to the museum where they’ve got pharoahs’ tombs!”
Funeral parlors, organ donation societies, embalming techniques, and lots and lots of marble — it’s all on display at the Salon of Death, in a surprisingly clinical atmosphere. Organizers hope some 25,000 visitors will stroll through the Salon to admire the rows upon rows of biodegradable coffins or the luxurious funerary urns.
Or rest one’s head in a coffin, as the case may be. “There you go, I did it,” said one young man who braved the experience. “It felt like chasing away a little devil.”
A publisher’s stand displayed a selection of funeral requiems on CDs and non-religious books such as “Knowing How to Die” by the ancient Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca or “Reflections on the Guillotine” by French writer Albert Camus. At another stand, a former journalist explained how his company helped people who have had near-death or out-of-body experiences to meet and talk about what they lived through.
Read the full story here. Or the original French article — La Mort tient salon au coeur de Paris.
Catholic-atheist meetings end with Pope Benedict appeal to youth
Pope Benedict urged French youths on Friday to help put God back into public debate, either as Christians sharing their faith or as non-believers seeking more justice and solidarity in a cold utilitarian world. In a video address from the Vatican to an evening rally outside Notre Dame Cathedral in central Paris, the pope also urged them to “tear down the barriers of fear of the other, the foreigner, of those who are not like you” that mutual ignorance can create.
Benedict’s address, projected on a large screen in the square, came at the end of two days of a Vatican-sponsored dialogue between Roman Catholics and atheists, part of a drive to revive the faith in Europe that is a hallmark of his papacy.
“The question of God doesn’t endanger society, it doesn’t threaten human life!” he told the crowd during a break in its evening of modern and ancient Christian music. “The question of God must not be absent from the great questions of our time.”
He said religions had nothing to fear from secular society as long as it had “an open secularism that lets all live as they believe, in accordance with their conscience.”
The success of secularists, especially in France, in pushing faith to the fringes of the public sphere prompted Benedict to launch the discussions with atheists due to continue in at least 16 European and North American cities over the next two years.
The series started in impressive surroundings — the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), the Sorbonne university and the Institut de France, home of the prestigious Academie Francaise. Click for the programme details in French for the sessions at UNESCO, the Sorbonne and the Institut de France.
Most speakers were eminent French thinkers, making the sessions feel more like a post-graduate philosophy seminar than a public debate likely to influence a wider public. They were also directed at select small audiences. Access to the UNESCO and the Institut de France events was by invitation only and the open session in the Sorbonne’s Grand Amphitheatre attracted at most around 200 people.
Catholics & Jews discuss their future dialogue, possible Muslim trialogue
Jewish and Roman Catholic leaders reviewing their dialogue over the past four decades expressed concern on Wednesday that younger generations had little idea of the historic reconciliation that has taken place between them. The two faiths must keep this awareness alive at a time when the last survivors of the Holocaust are dying and both the Catholic and Jewish worlds are changing in significant ways, they said at the end of a four-day interfaith conference.
The International Catholic-Jewish Liaison Committee (ILC) met in Paris to discuss the future of the dialogue begun after the Catholic Church renounced its anti-Semitism and declared its respect for Judaism at the Second Vatican Council in 1965.
“We have new generations for whom the problems between Judaism and Christianity, especially the Shoah, are history,” said Cardinal Kurt Koch, the top Vatican official for relations with Jews. “We can’t leave that to history.” Rabbi David Rosen of the American Jewish Committee said: “Today most young Catholics have no comprehension of how tragic the relationship in the past between Jews and Catholics was. Jews were viewed as the enemies of God, in league with the devil, responsible for the tragedies of the world,” he said, but the Church now saw them as “dearly beloved elder brothers.”
The closed-door talks took up the question of increasing contacts with Muslims without setting out any new initiatives. “We spoke about a trialogue of Catholics, Jews and Muslims because we have a lot in common,” Koch said. “But there are also problems. Some terms don’t always mean the same thing for us.”
Rabbi Richard Marker, the top world Jewish official for interfaith ties, said his International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultations already held discussions with some Muslim groups but there was no Islamic world body to speak to. The Vatican also has contacts with different groups in Islam.
IJCIC’s experience in bringing together different strands of Judaism could be a useful model for Muslims trying to create a world body to speak for them with Christians and Jews, he said. “I think there will be two tracks,” Marker said. “There will be some space for trilateral dialogue and there will be a necessity to maintain bilateral dialogue.”
Extend Catholic-Jewish amity to Islam, Jewish official tells dialogue meeting
The historic reconciliation between Jews and Roman Catholics over the past 40 years should be extended to Muslims to deal with the challenges of the 21st century, a senior Jewish official has said. The regular dialogue the two faiths have maintained since the Catholic Church renounced anti-Semitism at the Second Vatican Council should be “a model for transformed relations with Islam,” Rabbi Richard Marker told the opening session of a meeting reviewing four decades of efforts to forge closer ties after 1,900 years of Christian anti-Semitism and to ask how the dialogue can progress in the future.
“Forty years in the histories of two great world religions is but a blink of an eye,” Marker, chairman of the International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultation, said on Sunday evening. “But 40 years of a relationship is a sign of its maturity.”
“The focus of the world is no longer specifically on Jewish- Christian amity. We must, for so many reasons, involve the third of our Abrahamic siblings… Islam,” he added.
Major faiths have held countless bilateral meetings to foster better ties since the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) launched the world’s largest church on the path of dialogue. Christian and Jewish leaders increasingly meet their Muslim counterparts to seek common ground and better understanding, but none of these discussions have the history or depth of the Catholic-Jewish dialogue officially begun in 1971.
In those 40 years, the Catholic Church has apologized for its sins against the Jewish people and recognized Judaism as its spiritual “elder brother,” a step that Jewish leaders praise as a historic change in perspective. The dialogue has not always been easy. There is still much mutual misunderstanding at the grass-roots level and Jewish leaders are quick to criticize the Vatican over divisive topics, especially related to the Holocaust.
Read the full story here. See also our timeline “Ups and Downs in Catholic-Jewish relations.”
Timeline – Ups and downs in recent Catholic-Jewish relations
Senior officials from the Roman Catholic Church and international Jewish groups met on Monday in Paris to review relations after 40 years of sometimes difficult dialogue.
Following is a timeline of the ups and downs in Catholic-Jewish relations since the first papal visit to Israel.
1964 – Pope Paul VI is the first modern pope to visit the Holy Land. During the visit he avoids using the word Israel, which the Vatican did not recognise at the time.
1965 – The Second Vatican Council issues a document, “Nostra Aetate” (“In Our Times“), renouncing anti-Semitism and rejecting the idea of collective Jewish guilt for the death of Jesus.
1971 – The International Catholic-Jewish Liaison Committee holds the first of its biannual meetings in Paris.
1986 – Pope John Paul II visits Rome’s synagogue, becoming the first pope in nearly 2,000 years to visit a Jewish place of worship and saying Jews are “our beloved elder brothers”.
1994 – Vatican and Israel forge full diplomatic ties after almost 2,000 years of Christian-Jewish hostility.
I hope that I’m mistaken, but I believe that I posted a serious comment here a day or so ago, and it appears to have been blocked. If someone who has studied the issues covered in this post for many years can’t have their views aired because they don’t agree with the moderator’s views, why publish any views at all, if they must be views that everybody already SHARES?
The point that I would like to make is that it is very difficult to persuade Chritians that there is no way for them to escape responisibility for the Holocaust which took place in a country where 98% of the population professed to be Christians. 6 million Jews perished at the hands of millions of CHRISTIANS. After trying in vain to persuade Christians and especially Roman Catholics to face up to that responsibility, I have created a web page designed to ask Catholics to see why they should care about the tremendous harm done TO THEM (and not just to the Jewish OTHERS) by their church leaders. See http://JesusWouldBeFurious.Org/RC_victim s.html .
In France, far right seizes on Muslim street prayers
A call to prayer goes up from a loudspeaker perched on the hood of a car, and all at once hundreds of Muslim worshippers touch their foreheads to the ground, forming a sea of backs down the road. The scene is taking place not in downtown Cairo, but on a busy market street in northern Paris, a short walk from the Sacre Coeur basilica. To locals, it’s old news: some have been praying on the street, rain or shine, for decades.
But for Marine Le Pen — tipped to take over from her father this weekend as leader of the far-right National Front party — it is proof that Muslims are taking over France and becoming an occupying force, according to remarks she made last month.
Her comments caused a furore as she seized on the street prayers to drive home the idea that Islam is threatening the values of a secular country where anxiety over the role of Muslims in society has deepened in the past few years.
More than two thirds of French and German people now consider the integration of Muslims into their societies a failure, pollster IFOP said in a survey published on Jan. 5. In France, where Islam is the second-largest religion after Catholicism, 42 percent saw it as a threat to national identity.
“This has become a key political issue,” said Frederic Dabi, IFOP’s head of research. “Street prayers and the perceived growing influence of Islam are seen as impinging on French values of secularism, communal living.”
French “Satanic defenestration” story thrown out the window
Apart from the strikes against pension reform, one of the big stories in France that made headlines around the world these past few days has been about 12 people of African origin who reportedly jumped out of an apartment window in a Paris suburb to flee from a man they thought was the devil. A four-month old baby died in the incident. The initial stories spoke of satanic rituals, maybe something to do with voodoo, and a crazed collective leap into the dark.
The drama was said to have begun when a woman awoke late at night to find her husband walking in the bedroom naked. As one report put it:
She began screaming ‘it’s the devil! it’s the devil!’, and the man ran into the other room where 11 others adults and children were watching television. One woman grabbed a knife and stabbed the man before other family members pushed him out through the front door.
When the man forced his way back in, they all began screaming in terror and leapt from the balcony screaming ‘Jesus! Jesus!’ The naked man also leapt from the balcony after them, detectives said.
A four-month old baby died in his mother’s arms, while a two-year-old was critically injured.
Google News found 396 stories in English on this and 375 in French. But you can’t believe everything you read about belief. If the story sounded incredible, maybe that’s because it was.
A magistrate investigating the case has now thrown the “Satanic defenestration” story out the window. “There was no question of satanism or Satan,” magistrate Michel Desplan told journalists in Versailles on Monday. Police found religious books in the apartment, but “that’s nothing exceptional for a family of evangelicals.”
Scientists inch towards finding elusive “God particle” creating cosmos
Scientists working with particle accelerators in Europe and the United States said on Monday they may be closing in on the elusive Higgs Boson, the “God particle” believed crucial to forming the cosmos after the Big Bang.
Researchers from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project near Geneva said in just three months of experiments they had already detected all the particles at the heart of our current understanding of physics, the Standard Model.
The International Conference on High Energy Physics in Paris heard that experiments were progressing faster than expected and entering a stage in which “new physics” would emerge. This could include long-awaited proof of the existence of the Higgs Boson and the detection of dark matter, believed to make up about a quarter of the universe alongside an observable 5 percent and 70 percent consisting of invisible dark energy.
Physicists think this subatomic speck of matter, if it is ever found, could explain the mysterious code at the origin of the physical world. To know this would be to “know the mind of God,” as Einstein wanted to do. The physicist who launched the hunt for this elusive particle doesn’t like its nickname. “It embarrasses me,” Peter Higgs has said. “Although I am not a believer myself, it’s a misuse of terminology that might offend some people.”
“Although I am not a believer myself, it’s a misuse of terminology that might offend some people.”A-OK! Great quote!
Paris bans open-air “sausage & wine party” over Muslim concerns
A giant “sausage and wine” party planned later this week in a Paris neighbourhood with many Muslim residents risks sparking disturbances and will therefore be banned, police in the French capital announced on Tuesday.
The event, announced on the social networking site Facebook late last month (see page here in French), had drawn growing criticism from politicians and civic groups in recent days as its page containing barely disguised anti-Muslim slogans attracted over 7,000 members.
The event, called an “apéro géant” (giant cocktail party), was due on Friday. The main organiser, Sylvie François, wrote that she wanted the event to be “a joyous protest” against the closing down of roads in the Goutte d’Or neighbourhood every Friday by Muslims praying in the street outside the overcrowded mosque there. The Facebook page also appeared to signal the party’s thrust with appeals to “native Parisians” and complaints about “the resolute foes of our local wines and pork products.”
Ultra-trad Catholics upset rabbi’s lecture in Paris cathedral
Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris witnessed a scene on Sunday afternoon that seemed to be from a bygone age. A rabbi invited to deliver a lecture about Catholic-Jewish dialogue was interrupted by young arch-traditionalist Catholics who began to pray the rosary to make “amends for the outrage” of letting him speak there. Rabbi Rivon Krygier had to leave the nave and retire to the sacristy, where he read his text into a microphone to broadcast it to about 1,200 people who came to hear him. Read our full story here.
Rabbi Krygier, the head of a small Conservative Jewish congregation in Paris, had the grace to recognise that his hecklers were a tiny minority. “They’ll say they succeeded in banishing the rabbi to the sacristy,” he told the Catholic daily La Croix. “This is an act that has to be taken seriously, but the Christians active in dialogue seem much more determined to continue on this path.”
The warm round of applause that Krygier received when he returned to the nave after the lecture bore that out. At the same time, arch-traditionalists such as Rev. Régis de Cacqueray, head of the French section of the Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX) congratulated protesters for their “courage” and said: “The Paris cathedral is neither a synagogue nor a Masonic temple.”
An ultra-traditionalist blog called “Les Intransigeants” (The Intransigents) spoke its mind more openly: “Notre Dame again defended against the outrage by the merchants of the Temple.” The rest of the post was worse anti-Semitic venom.
This incident came at a time of growing tension between the mainstream French Church and a small minority of arch-traditionalists who reject the reforms of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), especially the opening it brought to fellow Christians, Jews and the faithful of other religions.
These arch-traditionalists, who are stronger in France than most other countries, have gotten several boosts from the Vatican in recent years. Pope Benedict lifted the excommunications of four SSPX bishops last year, a move that caused an embarrassing uproar when one turned out to be a Holocaust denier. The SSPX was then invited to doctrinal discussions at the Vatican, which are now going into their third round. Bishop Bernard Fellay, head of the Swiss-based SSPX, said recently that the Vatican theologians at the talks “wish the Church well but want to save the Council at the same time. This is a squaring of the circle.”
The French bishops, many of whom wanted the SSPX rebels to accept the Vatican II reforms before being returned to the Church, have responded by organising conferences such as Notre Dame’s Lenten Lectures series to explain the Vatican II reforms and their relevance for today’s Church to parishioners who may not know many details about an event that happened almost five decades ago.
To drosaupan:
I really wish that through this ecumenical dialogue, anti-Semites like you will be set straight, to get your history corrected and realize that the Romans killed Jesus, not the Jews.
The last Pope said “The Jews are our elder brothers.” Obviously, you weren’t listening.
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Resident FaithWorld Expert
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