Attack on Church in France Kills Priest, and ISIS Is Blamed

Archbishop Dominique Lebrun of Rouen, in a statement from Krakow, Poland, where he and other Roman Catholic leaders were gathered for the World Youth Day celebration, identified the victim as the Rev. Jacques Hamel, the auxiliary priest at the church.

 Archbishop Lebrun and other church officials gave Father Hamel’s age as 84, but the archdiocese’s website said he had been born in 1930 and ordained in 1958.

 The Rev. Federico Lombardi, a spokesman for the Vatican, said that Pope Francis was horrified at the “barbaric killing” of a priest and issued “the most severe condemnation of all forms of hatred.”

 About an hour later, an Interior Ministry spokesman, Pierre-Henry Brandet, told reporters in Paris that the two attackers had entered the church — it was not immediately clear whether the Mass had ended — armed with weapons. “Were they knives, were they handguns, it’s much too early to say,” he said.

 The Rouen unit of the B.R.I., a police team that specializes in major crimes like armed robberies and kidnappings, “arrived extremely quickly and positioned itself around the church.” The two hostage-takers left the church and were shot by the police, Mr. Brandet said. A police bomb squad searched the church to make sure it had not been booby-trapped. Counselors were sent to provide aid to three hostages who were rescued and who were not physically injured.

According to Father Moanda-Phuati, the parish priest, the church’s Tuesday Mass begins at 9 a.m. and lasts for about half an hour. Because of the summer holidays, attendance would have been low — fewer than 10 people, he estimated.

 France has had three major terrorist attacks in the space of 19 months: an assault on the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and other locations around Paris in January 2015, which killed 17 people; coordinated attacks on a soccer stadium, the Bataclan concert hall, and cafes and restaurants in and around Paris on Nov. 13, which killed 130 people; and a rampage on July 14 in the southern city of Nice by a man who rammed a cargo truck into a Bastille Day crowd and shot at the police with a handgun, killing 84 people.