Will the European Union decide to cancel the Schengen Agreement and prevent the unrestricted cross-border movement of people in the wake of the dastardly terrorist attacks in Paris last Friday the 13th?
This is a question that many who have enjoyed visiting European countries on a Schengen State Visa are asking as France has started to call on its neighbors not just to stand in solidarity with that beleaguered country but also to carry out stringent measures to prevent future acts of terrorism.
French investigators now know that one of the reasons those seven or nine young terrorists were able to carry out their bold act against humanity was because of porous, uncontrolled borders that came as a result of European Union countries (except the United Kingdom) agreeing to abolish their internal border controls in 1985 at the town of Schengen in Luxembourg. The terrorists had come in the day before from Brussels, Belgium where it appears that they would have been stopped had there been passport controls at that country’s border with France.
Even before the multiple tragedies unfolded in Paris, there were already growing clamors to rethink the Schengen Agreement in the wake of hundreds of thousands of refugees from battle-torn Syria pouring into many European countries, seeking asylum and eventually moving from one country to another.
Worse, there is the suspicion that some terrorists may have entered Europe as refugees and are probably now enjoying asylum status while plotting the next killing spree.
I was already fast asleep in Madrid, Spain when news of the multiple attacks in Paris broke out. I learned about it through Facebook when I woke up. Expectedly there was more police presence than the day before at Puerta del Sol plaza and other tourist spots in the city. Despite the dreadful news, however, the square continued to teem with tourists and locals alike. In a sense, no one can really predict with precision where and when the next terrorist attack will happen, given the increasing openness of European society during the last decades. But to stay at home, fearful of any terrorist attacks would have already made these Islamic terrorists a winner.
The solution therefore is not to close borders, for that would send a signal to these terrorists that Europe has raised the white flag, given up on the freedom she vowed to give everyone who came to visit her countries.
On the contrary, the correct response is to continue with life as usual, just as everyone who was at extremely crowded Puerta del Sol despite the possibility of a terrorist attack happening there.
The best response to these extremists is to show them that the open, tolerant and free society that these terrorists wallow in but hate so much to do to their own people, will continue and that Europe will not be cowed so easily by these acts of intolerance and inhumanity.
There is a time for mourning, but once tears are shed, Europeans must unite to defeat a common enemy who now lives and enjoys the very freedom of movement these terrorists so dislike to give to their own people.
And one way to do that is to show to these monsters that nothing will change except that their dastardly act has now pushed Europeans and their American allies to finally act as one and deal with the Islamic State with precision, with unfaltering resolve and as one united front. The time for cowardice and bickering is finally over.
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In the cold of Valladolid, Spain, we have been welcomed warmly by the Augustinians, the first missionaries to evangelize in Cebu, arriving with Miguel Lopez de Legazpi in 1565. Fr. Policarpio Hernandez, OSA, a 40-year missionary in Iloilo and Manila and now archivist of the Archivo de la Provincia Agustiniana de Filipinas (APAF), has been extremely helpful in providing us with as many documents and books as we can find. The archive is here at the Augustinian headquarters, the monastery of the Agustinos Filipinos de Valladolid, located at the aptly named Paseo Filipino. (The Philippine Embassy in Madrid has also been extremely helpful and efficient in facilitating our visit here on short notice.)
I am here with Fr. Jun Rebayla, SVD, the vice president for finance of the University of San Carlos and an accomplished photographer, to take images of as many documents as we can for three upcoming book projects of USC Press. We have found so much that it will probably take years to transcribe and then translate, documents that date to the beginnings of the mission in Cebu, starting with the founding of the Sto. Niño image and on to the expansion of the Augustinian missions south and north of Cebu City (then called the Ciudad del Santisimo Nombre de Jesus). These records date from the time of Legazpi in 1565 to around the early 1800s. More on this next week.
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