Faithfuls pray at the Massabielle cave in the Sanctuary of Lourdes, south-western France on Nov. 7, 2022. (Photo: AFP)
By Jonathan Luxmoore, OSV News
Jul 4 2023
French church leaders have welcomed a pledge by President Emmanuel Macron of major new steps to protect thousands of historic places of worship across the country, although a spokesman also urged the government to think long-term rather than rely on “momentary emotions.”
“The bishops’ conference is pleased that the president has so clearly restated the importance of our religious patrimony and its need for special care,” said Father Gautier Mornas, director of the French bishops’ conference department for sacred art.
“There are around 100,000 religious buildings in France, including 42,000 Catholic chapels, churches and cathedrals, and this vast emblematic patrimony shapes the French countryside. All French villages are built around churches — so caring for churches means caring for the country,” he added.
The priest spoke amid continuing debate on Macron’s June 5 announcement of a new initiative to safeguard the country’s ancient churches.
In an OSV News interview, he said political attention had been drawn to the challenge by a catastrophic April 2019 fire that wrecked Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, as well as by “graphic warnings” in a July 2022 cross-party Senate report that many could face demolition unless properly maintained.
“Within a year of the Notre Dame fire, the state had verified the condition of the country’s 190 historic cathedrals, recognizing the great public attachment to this fragile patrimony,” Father Mornas told OSV News.
“Meanwhile, the fact that both right-wing and communist senators agreed on the need for accelerated steps of protection, in a report with nationwide echoes, shows a nonpartisan approach to this pressing problem is possible,” he said.
Catholic churches, monasteries and convents in France, many devastated during and after the 1789-1799 revolution, were declared state property under a 1905 church-state separation law, which required local officials to maintain them at public expense while allowing clergy to use them for Masses.
With church attendance plummeting, however, local communes, or townships and municipalities, and councils have complained the requirement now imposes impossible fiscal burdens, especially in rural areas.
The French Senate report said the management of churches had been impeded by thefts and vandalism, as well as by conflicts between local mayors and parish rectors, adding that at least seven administrative departments, including Loire, Marne and Haute-Provence, had abandoned the statutory duty to maintain them.
Speaking June 5 during millennium celebrations at Normandy’s Mont-Saint-Michel monastery, a UNESCO World Heritage site, Macron said only 10,500 religious sites were listed as historic monuments with a right to Culture Ministry financial aid, indicating “additional steps” were needed to ensure state support.
He added that he had ordered “targeted measures” by September, including a nationwide “dedicated subscription” to encourage tax-deductible public donations, similar to a strategy used to fund the rebuilding of Notre Dame.
The announcement followed a February letter to Macron from 131 center-right parliamentarians, urging the protection of rural churches which made up “the soul of France,” and was welcomed by Edouard de Lamaze, president of the country’s Observatory of Religious Heritage, who said in a statement it would prevent churches from being “desecrated by property developers and speculators.”
The Observatory’s press officer, Delphine Guerlain, told OSV News that French citizens were “culturally attached” to their country’s religious patrimony, despite declining church participation, and would “give generously” once the president’s “dedicated subscription” was launched.
However, another Catholic expert, Benoît de Sagazan, told France’s Catholic Le Pelerin weekly previous that programs had been launched unsuccessfully to save the religious heritage, adding that at least 500 historic churches currently faced collapse without “urgent structural measures.”
Meanwhile, the honorary president of Europe’s Federation of Catholic Family Associations, Antoine Renard, also warned that “many questions” remained unanswered.
“France is home to a vast array of religious properties — but they’re in bad shape and need renewing, and Macron will certainly gain political support from this,” Renard told OSV News.
“But should we consider it as the real estate of the church, or of the country as a whole? This question has never been properly answered. While some wish these buildings to remain in religious use, others just view them as tourist sites.”
The 2022 Senate report’s authors, Pierre Ouzoulias and Anne Ventalon, said growing secularization has raised questions over the future of France’s “religious heritage,” and warned that up to 5,000 churches, many dating from the Middle Ages, would have to be sold or demolished by 2030 unless resources were allocated to maintain them.
They added that they had been tasked to recommend solutions following “pleas from distraught mayors,” unable to meet obligations under the 1905 church-state separation law.
Among nine recommendations, the report called for measures to prevent illegal trafficking of religious objects, and to counter “general indifference” by “re-socializing” places of worship.
“Only by enabling these buildings to become meaningful and useful again for a large part of the population can safeguarding the religious heritage be guaranteed,” the report said.
“As true common goods, these buildings have not just spiritual, but also historical, cultural, artistic and architectural value. They structure landscapes, define territorial identities, and provide vectors for transmitting local and national memory, as well as contributing to the quality of the living environment.”
The report was compiled following the collection of over $932 million in private and corporate donations for rebuilding Notre Dame, which is expected to reopen for religious worship in April 2024 before the Paris Olympic Games.
Renard said he feared “ideological opposition” to supporting Catholic buildings, but believed this would lessen in the face of “fast-moving opinion.”
“The reaction to the Notre Dame disaster was certainly a good sign of general public readiness to support the religious patrimony — there’s more public generosity at large than some might have expected,” the lay Catholic told OSV News.
“Some people opposed to the church sought to use Notre Dame’s reconstruction to stop it from being used as a cathedral, and have it placed entirely in state hands. But this strength of public awareness has prevented this,” he said.
In his June 5 address, Macron said he had sought to prioritize preserving France’s cultural heritage since assuming office in 2017, through a “historic increase” in budgets for thousands of religious “restoration projects.”
However, Father Mornas said church leaders still awaited a “detailed program” for Macron’s new initiative.
He added that the bishops’ conference would be launching its own inventory on the “general state of the religious patrimony” ahead of the pope’s September 2023 visit to Marseille, which would attempt to “catalog and valorize” not only buildings, but also religious works of art, museum exhibits and popular traditions such as processions and pilgrimages.
Problems with maintaining historic churches have occurred in other European countries, including the Netherlands, where Cardinal Willem Ejk put Utrecht’s 16th-century Gothic St. Catherine’s Cathedral up for sale in 2019 and warned in a pastoral letter that two-thirds of his archdiocese’s churches would be forced to close by 2050 because of falling participation of churchgoers and rising costs. – UCA News
