Satire, but it’s not funny enough to be inappropriate for the time:
Pope Shrugs, Signs Over Notre Dame To Waqf For Use As Mosque
“Within a couple of generations, it’s questionable whether there will be any Christians at all left in Europe.”
Paris, July 14 – Demographic shifts and political considerations have led the head of the Roman Catholic Church to bow to reality and present one of the world’s most famous and elaborate churches to French Muslims to serve as their house of worship and no longer function as a cathedral, the Vatican announced today.
Beginning January 1, 2027, Notre Dame de Paris Cathedral will come under the control of the Islamic Council of France, as Catholicism is on the decline in France and Islam continues to grow at a remarkable rate. Pope Leo XIV signed the transfer document yesterday, and made a statement to the media expressing sadness that the eight-hundred-year-old church no longer serves much of a purpose in catering to France’s and Europe’s shrinking Christian population, but also voiced his hope that the Muslims will take care of the historic building.
“They have much more use for it than we do,” the pope admitted. “Within a couple of generations, it’s questionable whether there will be any Christians at all left in Europe. Certainly not in Paris.”
The arrangement calls for the Catholic Church to remove any iconography and sacred detachable items that it deems appropriate to preserve, such as statues of the Virgin Mary and various stained glass windows. The building’s Gothic facade, which features numerous sculptures of Christian religious and historical import, will undergo a special facelift to remove those images, which fall afoul of Islamic sensibilities on depictions of various sorts. The removed and detached paraphernalia of Notre Dame will take up residence at a new museum in Rome, at least until such time as the Vatican itself becomes an Islamic shrine sometime in the next 75 years.
Church and Waqf negotiators agreed on the start of 2027 for the transfer: it provides enough time for the salvage and facade work while effecting the transfer with enough time before Ramadan of that year, which commences on Sunday, February 7, for the Waqf to implement any aesthetic or functional changes it deems necessary ahead of Ramadan and the Eid el-Fitr festival that marks that lunar month’s conclusion.
The transfer of Notre Dame de Paris marks the largest such gifting so far of an underused Christian institution to the up-and-coming Muslim community in Europe, but numerous smaller-scale donations of churches and church institutions have taken place over the last two decades amid the demographic shifts and the Vatican’s longstanding policy of appeasing Islamists.
From PreOccupied Territory, here.