The French National Anthem is played at Notre Dame during a mass for the victims of the Friday the 13th massacres in Paris.
My favorite rendition of La Marseillaise :
It seems appropriate these days as the Jihadists, if they had the power, would not be surpassed by the Third Reich in any crime against God and Man.
On a positive note, our pastor celebrated yesterday’s 9AM Mass remembering the parish active duty military and their families. We went for our son.
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After, the school children hosted us for coffee and cake. I spoke with our wonderful visiting priest who is a 20 year Navy veteran and then his vocation and then several years as Navy Chaplain. We were given prayer cards for Father Cappaddano and another Chaplain who gave the last full measure in WWII. Kipling in his Irish Brigade in the Great War wrote something about the chaplains’ attitude when the brass tried to keep them out of the front lines, “What is a wound when souls are to be saved?”
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The Mass recessional hymn was the first and third stanzas of America. Sometimes the eye allergies hit Third stanza:
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“O beautiful for heroes proved
In liberating strife.
Who more than self their country loved
And mercy more than life!
America! America!
May God thy gold refine
Till all success be nobleness
And every gain divine!”
..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLOq2VJnE0w
http://www.cfnews.org/page88/files/8ff2c46ff9166e931b44257cd0e743db-495.html
On Sunday morning, on the BBC’s Andrew Marr show, Nicholas Courjal’s rendering of La Marseillaise brought tears to the eyes of Mlle Sylvie Berman, French ambassador to the Court of St James
http://tinyurl.com/qbcn7oz
She was not alone.