Saint Joan of Arc, Islam and the Christian rebirth
By Roberto de Mattei | 18 June 2025
On 1 June 2025, during the urban warfare that bloodied the French capital on the occasion of the Champions League final, some young Islamists raised a jihadist flag atop the statue of St Joan of Arc in the Place des Pyramides. St Joan of Arc is the patroness of France, a nation that is built on the foundations of Christian civilisation. The mission of the Maid of Orléans was to win back, before any territory, that sacred conception of sovereignty which is at the root of the history of France and Europe. The desecration of the statue of Joan of Arc is therefore an outrage to the national identity of our continent and confirms the gravity of the Islamist threat.
French interior minister Bruno Retaillaus downplayed the scale of the riots, but former minister Gérard Darmanin admitted that the violence was caused by immigrant gangs, and not by a football row. The uprisings involved several cities, with violence, looting and clashes with the police: 192 injured (mostly police officers), three dead, 642 arrested. The French government’s strategy of using football as a political tool to promote the inclusion and integration of immigrants has proven to be a failure because, instead of uniting, it is generating division and violence.
A 73-page government report, entitled Les Frères musulmans et islamisme politique en France, presented by Le Figaro on 20 May 2025, brought to light the Muslim Brotherhood’s “entrisme” project to deeply infiltrate French institutions and society, with the ultimate goal of imposing sharia law, using apparently democratic language. The report identifies 139 places of worship controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood, in addition to another 68 considered “proximate”, spread over 55 departments. To these are added 280 associations active in key sectors: education, charity, youth, business and finance.
Also of concern is “preaching 2.0”, or the spread of Islamist principles through social networks like TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. Some religious influencers, with hundreds of thousands of followers, manage to influence large segments of young people, contributing to the slow and pervasive transformation of the French social and cultural fabric.
The report is not limited to France, but highlights how various European Islamic organisations — including the Federation of Islamic Organisations in Europe and the European Council for Fatwa and Research — are inspired by the principles of the Muslim Brotherhood. To these are added other groups, like Hizb ut-Tahrir, which aims to create a global caliphate while rejecting violence, and the Salafi movements, often conservative and religiously activist. Finally, the document points out the danger of jihadist networks like Al-Qaeda and ISIS, which have exploited discontent and marginalisation to recruit young Europeans into their ranks. Since 2014 there have been over thirty deadly attacks on the continent.
Back in the 1990s, Cardinal Silvio Oddi (1910–2001), who had been nuncio to Egypt, stated that the real great danger he saw for the future of Europe was the advance of Islam. And back in 1993, the Lepanto Cultural Centre organised a large public protest against the construction of the mosque in Rome, the largest in Europe, denouncing the political and cultural role played by the Islamic mosques. With the title Mosquées, les casernes de l’islamisation, an illuminating study has been published in recent days in France by the association Avenir de la Culture, under the direction of Atilio Faoro. The book is a thorough investigation dedicated to the “barracks” of Islam, whose subversive role it brings to light. The conclusions are irrefutable. Mosques, estimated at around 2,600 in France, are not simply places meant for prayer, but can be considered militant centres where the Islamic culture and lifestyle are lived and spread.
The Muslim Brotherhood is one of three fundamentalist currents that today control hundreds of French mosques. A strongly competing galaxy is that of Sunni Salafism, a movement that is little structured but has great influence among young Muslims and, like the Muslim Brotherhood, does not hide its hatred for the West. Various mosques linked to this school of thought have served as a springboard to jihadism. Finally, there is Turkish Islam, supported by President Erdogan, it too in full expansion on French soil. Under its aegis numerous mosques have been built, like the one in Strasbourg, which, once completed, is to be the largest in Europe.
In this respect, the banner of Islam that was raised atop the statue of Joan of Arc on 1 June appears as a clearly symbolic gesture, not without connection to the approval, on 28 May, of assisted suicide by the National Assembly: a measure that, if adopted definitively, would mark a new stage in the process of self-dissolution of the Christian identity of France. By approving the Falorni bill on the “right to aid in dying”, the National Assembly has in fact once again proclaimed the right to legal murder, as President Emmanuel Macron had already done last 19 January by calling for the inclusion of abortion in Europe’s Charter of Fundamental Rights.
The expansive force of Islam lies in the weakness of the secularised society it faces. Third and fourth generation immigrants of Muslim origin have lost the original identity of their fathers and grandfathers and, faced with the collapse of Western society, have become followers of a destructive anarchism. For them the alternative to nihilism is adherence, not necessarily religious, to radical Islamism, a political religion that fills their moral void. The Catholic Church should respond to the ideological caricature of Islamism by proposing an integral vision of the world based on the Gospel, in which is found the solution to all the problems of the contemporary world. It is in fact the lack of faith, as Leo XIV said on 9 May in his first homily, that “is often tragically accompanied by the loss of meaning in life.”
But the concluding words of Atilio Faoro’s work are encouraging: “On 15 April 2019 the whole world was witness, horrified, to the flames that devastated the most famous of our cathedrals. This terrible trial reminds us that, as for Notre-Dame, the life of Christian peoples and nations passes through the cross. This tragedy also invites us to never lose faith. Faced with the devastation left by the fire, many doubted that the building could one day regain its splendour. On 8 December 2024 Notre-Dame nonetheless reopened its doors in the presence of heads of state of the whole world and an immense crowd, more beautiful than ever. This restoration is a lesson for us all. How many times do we believe that all is lost, that the ruins are definitive?”
The spectacular event that this year, at Pentecost, saw 19,000 pilgrims traverse on foot the roughly 100 kilometres from Paris to the cathedral of Chartres, is one of the many lights of hope that are being lit, like the restoration of Notre-Dame and the increase in conversions from Islam in France. Many centuries ago the Lord showed his special love for France by sending a little shepherdess from Lorraine who took up arms and saved her. “Men will fight, and God will give them the victory”, Joan of Arc said, with words that constitute a programme. At the beginning of the twenty-first century the example of the holy warrior is a model not only for the French, but for all those who, with thought, prayer and action, defend Christian Civilisation from its enemies.