Mass at St Joseph’s Church in Medan, Indonesia, took a blood-curdling twist last Sunday when an 18-year-old suddenly left his pew and ran towards the celebrant, Fr Albert Pandiangan, wielding an axe.
Members of the congregation managed to restrain the assailant, but only after he had struck the 60-year-old priest with the axe, injuring the cleric’s hand. The young man also carried a bomb in his backpack which, mercifully, failed to detonate.
Indonesian police said shortly afterwards that there was no clear motive for the attack, but the perpetrator reportedly carried a pro-ISIS symbol and insisted that he was not acting alone.
Coming just weeks after the murder of Fr Jacques Hamel in France by Islamists, the attack is likely to increase anxieties about the safety of priests at Mass almost everywhere in the world. After all, Fr Hamel was not celebrating Midnight Mass at the Notre-Dame Cathedral in the nation’s capital. No: he was brutally murdered in rural France, at a quiet Tuesday morning Mass with only five people in the congregation.
Since Fr Hamel’s murder many Mass-goers are likely to have wondered what they should do in the event of such an attack. Judging by the Home Office’s guidelines on terror attacks, Catholics should “run, hide and tell” rather than confront the attacker. The Government advises members of the public to hide in a safe place – barricading themselves in if they must – and turning their mobile phones on to silent, until it is safe to contact the police.
Both the state and the police in Britain seem to be taking the possibility of church attacks seriously. Following Fr Hamel’s murder, the Home Office said it would be spending £2.4 million to bolster security in places of worship. It also issued detailed advice on security to 47,000 churches across the country.
In an interview with the BBC in July, Canon Philip Moor, vicar-general of Shrewsbury diocese, said: “We have received security advice and their advice is that we should not be alarmed but be alert. So really our advice to all those coming to church is not to be overly anxious, to carry on as normal but to be vigilant – to be alert and aware and to report anything suspicious or concerning.”
The advice booklet for clergy, available on the Home Office website, runs to 77 pages and includes detailed instructions about various scenarios, including bomb threats, suicide attacks and suspicious parcels.
The document says that access to side and rear entrances to churches should be denied to “all but authorised people” and recommends “random screening of hand baggage” as “a significant deterrent”.
The guidance suggests that churches should contain “grab bags” in the event of an attack – filled with items such as first aid kits, glow sticks, torches, high visibility jackets, water and glucose tablets.
But if this guidance were followed to the letter, might churches soon begin to feel alien to worshippers? For example, you would no longer be able to nip into Westminster Cathedral through the side door, in order to cause minimum disruption during Mass, to light a candle by the Lady Chapel. In the interests of security you would instead be forced to go to the main door and join the queue while somebody checked your handbag or rucksack before going into the Cathedral for quiet prayer.
While big cathedrals have the support of administrative staff to ensure that all security measures are in place, isolated and busy priests in sleepy towns or rural areas would have to depend on the goodwill of a parishioner who was happy to volunteer their time to organise an emergency “grab bag” and ensure it was always well-stocked.
However well intentioned the latest advice is, it is not very realistic. After all, the job of a priest has never been a safe one. If a priest hears a knock on his door in the middle of the night, he is called to open it, without necessarily knowing who is on the other side.
As Canon Moor explained: “Safety is always a concern. The majority of priests now live in houses on their own, so that in itself makes them vulnerable.”
And how much can Government funding for church security actually achieve? “I do not see how any parish church could benefit from the Government funding, unless it is to put in CCTV, which most of them have already,” said Fr Alexander Lucie-Smith, consulting editor of the Catholic Herald.
“We can’t make churches like banks. People have to get into them. They have to be open to all. That is the whole point of being a church. In the end, when we take the mission we receive from God seriously, to be a house of prayer for all peoples, we also put our faith in God as our security.”
In other words, before Catholics prepare to “run, hide and tell”, they should perform another action: pray that they will never be faced with the horrors of France or Indonesia and that their parish priest will always remain safe, despite the potential dangers he must face each day.
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