There Is No God But God
The Pope wept.
His chief aide, Monsignor _________, had swept into his dining quarters with the news, his face as white as the watered silk cassock His Holiness had worn just minutes before.
In Rome, RAI repeated the news, over and over, like a mantra in a newly-created circle of hell. Reports of vomiting police, public fainting epidemics, and pregnant women giving birth in the street were common.
In Paris, the nervous rapidity of the TV1 newsreader fractured the syllables of “La Gloire de la France.” Stores, restaurants, and museums closed as panicked families plucked their children off the streets. The French military occupied Paris, Nice, Lille, Toulouse, Calais, Lyon and other locations, including all 59 nuclear facilities throughout France.
In Athens, police units wielding clubs and shields roamed the silent and deserted streets in armoured vests and bullet-proof helmets. The shattered President of Greece choked out a few words on ERT1: “We are at war with the enemies of Western Civilization, and of its values of tolerance, civility, self-criticism, open discussion, and liberating doubt.”
In Vatican City, the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam and Last Judgement of Christ; in Paris, the Louvre, Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, the Venus de Milo, and thousands of other priceless and irreplaceable masterworks; in Athens, the Parthenon—all simultaneously bombed and utterly destroyed.
More than 1,900 people blown to pieces, burned to death, or shot dead, including 167 schoolchildren. More than 300 blinded, maimed, arms and legs blown off.
After the Bataclan Theatre mass shooting in Paris 13 November 2015—where 89 people were shot dead and over 200 wounded in a coordinated terrorist attack—news outlets reported that the French government suppressed information concerning torture and mutilation, “so as not to create racial tensions.” This time, at the Sistine Chapel, Louvre, and Parthenon, tourists, staff, and visiting schoolchildren had their eyes gouged out, heads cut off and bodies disemboweled. Schoolboys and schoolgirls were raped and sodomized before having their throats cut. Men were castrated and had their testicles shoved into their mouths. Women had their genitals stabbed and ripped out.
But few this time followed the destruction, throat cuttings, beheadings, rape, torture, and mutilations with disbelief, then condemnations, condolences, and shrines of flowers, candles and letters for the dead.
It is said that when John F. Kennedy was assassinated, the family remained stoic. But when Robert Kennedy was assassinated, the family fell apart.