On July 26th 2016, millions of young people at World Youth Day in Krakow were greeted by the shocking news that Fr. Jacques Hamel had been murdered by ISIS as he prepared to celebrate Mass at his church in Normandy.
The two terrorists who killed him had been monitored by authorities but were able to slip through the cracks.
During the attack, one of the perpetrators handed a nun a phone and told her to record the murder.
He asked the nun if she was scared. She answered ‘no’. Curious, the terrorist asked her why not. The nun answered that she trusted in Jesus. The terrorist then stated that ‘Jesus was just a man’.
This strange anecdote, during a wider period which saw the terror at the Bataclan and Nice, gets to a deeper spiritual aspect than one would learn from headlines.
