“This is the sign of the Church always”: The fifth anniversary of Fr. Jacques Hamel’s martyrdom – Catholic World Report

Five years ago this very day, an 85 year-old French priest named Jacques Hamel woke and, as he had done practically every other morning of his 58 years as a priest, made his way to the local parish church to offer morning Mass. This in itself is something quite remarkable. Fr. Hamel was ordained for the Archdiocese of Rouen, France in 1958 and early in his priesthood endured the trying decades of the 1960s and 1970s, when many priests of his generation abandoned the clerical state. Over the course of his life, he had witnessed France embrace a hardened secularism. Sunday Mass attendance, for example, is far lower than there than even here in the United States.

“This is the sign of the Church always”: The fifth anniversary of Fr. Jacques Hamel’s martyrdom – Catholic World Report