Muslim female journalist defends Latin Mass from Pope

Sonia Mabrouk's fight for the sacred

PARTI PRIS. In her new essay, the Europe 1 and CNews journalist wants to "reclaim the sacred". But what has bitten her?

Sacrilege! When Sonia Mabrouk spoke about her attachment to the Latin Mass on Quelle époque! the (otherwise pleasant) Saturday night talk show on France 2, she found herself under the wrathful spell of her fellow star journalists, Léa Salamé and Élise Lucet. Everyone thinks what they want about the substance of the subject and should normally have the right to say so. But well...

The thing to remember about this exchange is that the Latin mass, in a dechristianised, fractured, radicalised France, which has its head in pensions and high living costs, is a controversy in a Saturday night celebrity talk show. And this is thanks to Sonia Mabrouk. After the success of Insoumission française, the journalist offers a hard-hitting essay with a striking title: Reconquering the Sacred (Éd. de L'Observatoire).

A spiritual path

The insane one! What has bitten this TV star, who every morning cooks for politicians who are often devitalized, to want to raise his contemporaries beyond themselves? Need for oxygen? Let's be permeable once again to the invisible, to mystery and to the sublime," Sonia Mabrouk bravely states in her opus. Let's stop the ugly movement of our lives. Let's conquer eras without elevation. Let's chase away the bad shadows that prevent us from thinking about the world in any other way than through machines and numbers. Let us experience again the inner experience, the practice of withdrawing into ourselves. Let us not despair of finding the path of the sacred. In this archipelago of disgrace, there are still islands of sanctuary, preserved from the incessant movement of the world. Let us escape from the surrounding hypermarket. Let's get away from it all. Let us discover all that is still unsuspected in us. It is up to us to have the courage to take the essential paths that lead there. These are inner paths that require silence, solitude, withdrawal from ourselves and concealment. There is nothing new or revolutionary in adopting such an attitude.

Sonia Mabrouk does not invite her contemporaries to a sermon, but to a spiritual path, like Gad Elmaleh in his moving (and successful) film Reste un peu, a "path full of pitfalls", she notes, "as brutal as the battle of men", as Rimbaud said. The shock interviewer followed "a slow conversion" which put her "in a singular state of resignation, both joyful and combative" and which led her to become "sensitive to the question of the immortality of the soul". Fiend.

In our increasingly liquid societies, it is imperative to reconnect with a reinvigorated sacredness. We cannot live without the sacred.

A true inner adventure, which she shares with her readers, with courage and generosity, which leads her from the Saint-Louis cathedral overlooking the bay of Carthage near Tunis to the shocking confession of the brutal death of a beloved mother who left for heaven knowing that she was accompanied by God and passing him on to her daughter. Sonia Mabrouk does not assert, she evokes, she touches with delicacy, a delicacy required by the sacred and whose absence undermines our world of "din and cynicism". Like Gad Elmaleh, she does not speak of religion, but of faith, and more... The memory of her mother running her hand through her hair as a child is also sacred.

It's up to each of us to pay attention: this grace creeps into all the interstices of our society, as an "antidote to the dullness of Western civilisation at a time when it has nothing left to offer but a string of contritions", the author points out. For this warrior, the sacred, which, she points out, "is not necessarily synonymous with beauty and elevation", is first and foremost a struggle. We are in the process of replacing the sacred with the profane," says Sonia Mabrouk with alarm. It is urgent to put an end to this devastating movement. In our increasingly liquid societies, it is imperative to reconnect with a reinvigorated sacred. We cannot live without the sacred. It is one of the subjects, if not the neuralgic subject".

And this is how the valiant woman enters the battlefield. She does not speak of a "clash of civilisations" as Huntington did in his time, even if this appears in the background of her demonstration, and for her, "a conflict of sacralities is a perfectly plausible scenario". The young woman born and raised in Muslim culture warns bluntly: "The vigour of the sacred in the land of Islam contrasts with its atrophy in the West. 

Source

Cathcon:  And here the role call of deep and profound honour of the signatories of the letter to Pope Paul VI, headed by one Agatha Christie, that lead to the "Agatha Christie" indult in favour of the Latin Mass.   It is a fight for civilisation and the Pope is on the wrong side.