A video of a Catholic nun tackling someone went viral. What made things turn violent?
You’ve heard of Catholic nuns taking vows of poverty, chastity and even silence, but what about vowing to protect a church construction project from environmental activists stealing building supplies?
A group of nuns were captured on video over the weekend doing just that on behalf of the Catholic Church in France. They put themselves between protesters and a building site in hopes of enabling construction to continue as planned.
When some protesters broke through the barricade, one nun took things up a notch.
The video, which was recorded and shared on X by journalist Léo Chapuis, shows her tackling a man who was trying to run off with (and likely destroy) some pipe-building supplies.
She runs and grabs “the man who is holding plastic piping before they tumble into the dirt,” The Messenger reported.
Énorme ! La bonne sœur qui plaque un écologiste… du grand spectacle en Ardèche où des religieuses défendent le chantier d’un futur centre religieux face aux militants qui bloquent à cause de l’impact sur l’environnement.
🎥 @ferro_nicolas
☝️plaquage non réglementaire pic.twitter.com/3wSyO7s3LO— Léo Chapuis (@leo_chapuis) October 16, 2023
The nun’s surprising move was just one small part of a longer fight between the construction project’s supporters and detractors, according to the TV station France 3. It reported that the violence continued for about an hour before the clashing parties moved apart.
“I expected the nuns to be a little reasonable for the public order. The problem is that the religious people decided to resort to violence. I was attacked three times by five people, who snatched me, who wanted to throw me out there. They decided to protect the site with their actions and their bodies,” said Sylvain Hérenguel, co-president of the association for the future of the Bourges valley, to France 3, according to Fox News.
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Hérenguel and others are protesting the construction project in Saint-Pierre-de-Colombier in southern France due to concerns about its potential impact on the environment. They’ve successfully delayed the building project by several years.
“Construction on the project originally began in December 2018 with plans to construct a basilica that could hold 3,500 people. ... By June 2020, activists installed a Zone to Defend (ZAD) around the area, eventually leading to construction being halted by October of that year. However, construction resumed by 2022 following additional environmental studies on the area,” Fox News reported.
Protests have continued despite these additional studies because environmental activists believe more attention should have been paid to the project’s impact on native plants. Protesters have also questioned why such a large religious building is needed in a very small town.
“We are a pacifist ecological movement. We are simply preventing the construction from being carried out before obtaining the correct environmental studies,” activists said in a statement to Fox News Digital.
After the recent physical confrontation between protesters and nuns on the construction site, the nuns returned to more peaceful activities, like singing, France 3 reported.
