RUTHFULLY YOURS

One year ago, Father Jacques Hamel was killed by two men, both of whom pledged allegiance to ISIS, while celebrating morning Mass in Normandy, France. Hamel had served as a priest for almost six decades. Pope Francis referred to him as a “martyr,” pointing out that he “accepted his martyrdom next to the martyrdom of Christ, on the altar.”

Martyrdom may seem like it is confined to the ancient past — something that Christians dealt with while under Roman dominion — but the last few years have witnessed an increasing number of Christian martyrs. Coptic Christians in Egypt, for example, have suffered numerous attacks by the Islamic State. Father Hamel joined the ranks of these martyrs, and did so with courage, in his final moments, to call the enemy by its real name, saying to the attackers, “Begone, Satan!”

Moreover, as John L. Allen Jr., the editor of Crux, observed, Hamel was “a classic exemplar of one of the most profound lessons of the martyrs”:

Beyond all the heartache and frustrations we may experience in the Church sometimes, there’s still something so precious about the faith that, when push comes to shove, ordinary people, with zero aspiration to heroism, will nevertheless pay in blood before they let it go.

While debates concerning the future direction of the Church have resulted in passionate disagreement between liberals and conservatives, Father Hamel is one subject on which Catholics of all political persuasions agree. “The extraordinary response to Hamel’s martyrdom throughout France,” writes Christopher White for Crux, “has been one of unity and an abiding belief that his sacrifice would yield a greater good for both the Church and the country.”

Besides nurturing a spirit of unity within the Church, Hamel’s death created an opportunity for a closer relationship between French Catholics and Muslims. At a Mass celebrated in honor of the one-year anniversary of his death, French president Emmanuel Macron noted that “By murdering Father Hamel at the foot of his altar, the two terrorists undoubtedly wanted to sow the thirst for vengeance and retaliation among French Catholics.” Instead, Catholic leaders refused to use tragedy to sow discord and fear, and in the days following Father Hamel’s death, Muslims across France attended Mass in solidarity with Catholics.

Father Hamel died just as inklings of a Catholic revival in France were becoming apparent. A few months ago, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, wrote in America magazine that he had begun to notice more people seemed to be attending Mass:

A few years ago, I started to realize something. Whenever I was less than five minutes early for Mass, I had to go to the overflow room, and I would typically have to step over people sitting on the floor to get there. The church was filled to the gills every Sunday, with young families and children most of the time. . . . Then I moved. And I saw the same thing. I live in a very different neighborhood now, one that is “upwardly mobile,” as real estate agencies coyly say. But on Sunday morning the church is packed.

SHARK ISLAND, Namibia—Just over a century ago, Germany built one of its first concentration camps on a narrow peninsula jutting into the Atlantic.

A 1904 uprising in what was then called German South-West Africa turned into a war of annihilation against the Herero and Nama peoples. At least 60,000 are believed to have died, including some 2,000 in the Shark Island camp, where inmates were starved, beaten and worked to death.

That episode of colonial brutality, considered by many historians to be the first genocide of the 20th century, is now testing the limits of historical apologies.

Namibia says it wants Germany to officially recognize that its actions constituted genocide, to issue a formal apology and to pay reparations. Berlin says it is willing to meet the first two demands and to pay some form of compensation. The two countries have been negotiating for more than a year.Other governments have expressed regret or sorrow for past atrocities. What makes the current situation novel is that most have stopped short of any official apology, and financial payments have been rare.

The talks “are being watched very closely by other countries,” says Germany’s ambassador to Namibia, Christian Schlaga.

Debate has surged in recent years about whether and how nations should take responsibility and make amends for horrors inflicted generations ago.

Belgium apologized for its role in the 1961 assassination of Congo’s first post-independence prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, but not for its colonial abuses in that country. In 2006, then-U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair expressed “deep sorrow” for Britain’s role in the slave trade, but didn’t apologize.

Former French President François Hollande recognized the suffering of Algerians under France’s “brutal and unfair” colonial rule, but again there was no official apology. Last year, U.S. President Barack Obama paid homage to the victims of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, but didn’t apologize.

Japan has come the closest to what Germany is trying to do now. In 2015, it settled a long-running dispute with South Korea by agreeing to pay about $9 million in support funds for surviving Korean “comfort women” used as sex slaves by the Japanese military in the 1930s and 1940s. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe extended an apology.The question has exquisite historical resonance for Germany in particular. Countless museums and memorials throughout the country act as reminders of Germany’s genocidal slaughter during World War II. Because most Germans accept their history has dark chapters, and are proud of how they have been handled, they might find it easier to face colonial atrocities than citizens of other European powers, says Jürgen Zimmerer, professor of global history at the University of Hamburg and president of the International Network of Genocide Scholars.

Following World War II, Germany acknowledged its responsibility for the Holocaust and agreed to pay damages to survivors, but not to the families of those who were killed.

A successful conclusion to the negotiations between Germany and Namibia “would be a signal, and an invitation, to other former colonial powers to deal with their past,” says Medardus Brehl, a historian at the Institute for Diaspora and Genocide Studies at the ​Ruhr-University Bochum in Germany.

At the same time, ​a growing number of Germans are beginning to bristle at constantly carrying their historical guilt. Right-wing parties have recently called for the country to move beyond its past and develop a new sense of patriotism. CONTINUE AT SITE

BERLIN—A rejected asylum applicant from the United Arab Emirates killed one person and injured six others in a stabbing rampage at a Hamburg supermarket on Friday, officials said, an attack that could reignite debate over security and immigration as the German election approaches.

The 26-year-old suspect, whose identity wasn’t released, couldn’t be deported because he lacked identity papers, Hamburg Mayor Olaf Scholz said in a statement late Friday.

“It further makes me angry that the attacker appeared to be someone who sought protection among us in Germany and then turned his hatred against us,” Mr. Scholz said. “This shows how urgently the legal and practical obstacles to deportation must be removed.”

The attack began in a supermarket in the Barmbek section of northeast Hamburg, where the suspect stabbed a 50-year-old German man to death with a large knife, police said. The attacker injured five others, at least some of them as he fled, and a 35-year-old Turkish bystander suffered injuries as he subdued the attacker before authorities arrived.

The attacker yelled “Allahu akbar”—Arabic for “God is great”—according to one witness interviewed by Germany’s N-TV television and another whose interview with reporters on the scene circulated in a video on social media.

A Hamburg police spokeswoman said she couldn’t confirm the “Allahu akbar” exclamation or that the attack was ideologically motivated. “We are investigating in all directions,” she said.

But the revelation that a rejected asylum applicant appeared to have carried out the attack had the potential to revive Germany’s immigration debate—an issue that has largely faded into the background even as the Sept. 24 national election approaches. Ever since the influx of hundreds of thousands of refugees and migrants to Germany two years ago, Chancellor Angela Merkel has pushed to tighten asylum laws, speed deportations and negotiated with Turkey and north African countries to reduce the number of migrants who reach Europe’s shores.

While several hundred asylum applicants are still crossing into Germany daily, officials say, those numbers are a far cry from the thousands a day seen in 2015. Germany hasn’t had a terrorist attack since last December, when an Islamic State supporter drove a truck into a Christmas market in Berlin, leaving 12 dead. CONTINUE AT SITE