A French court has ordered a small town to remove a statue of the Virgin Mary, saying the religious display violates the separation of church and state. However, residents believe this is just another attack by left-wing activists to attack France’s heritage and traditions.
The statue is located at a crossroads in La Flotte, a municipality of 2,800 inhabitants on the popular holiday island Ile-de-Re, off France’s Atlantic coast.
A local family erected the statue after World War II in gratitude for a father and son having returned from the conflict alive.
Its initial home was a private garden, but the family later donated it to the town, which set it up at the crossroads in 1983.
In 2020, it was damaged by a passing car, and the local authorities decided to restore the statue and put it back in the same place, but this time on an elevated platform.
Complaint
That move triggered a legal complaint by the left-wing activist group La Libre Pensee 17, which claims to be dedicated to the defense of secularity, on the basis that a French law dating back to 1905 forbids religious monuments in public spaces.
A court in Poitiers followed the argument as did, on appeal, the regional court in Bordeaux, ordering La Flotte to remove the statue, according to a press statement.
Local mayor Jean-Paul Heraudeau called the discussion around the statue “ridiculous” because, he said, it was part of the town’s “historical heritage” and should be considered “more of a memorial than a religious statue.”
But while the court accepted that the authorities had not intended to express any religious preference, it also said that “the Virgin Mary is an important figure in the Christian religion,” which gives it “an inherently religious character.”
According to Catholic doctrine going back to the New Testament, God chose Mary to give birth to Jesus while remaining a virgin through the Holy Spirit.
Catholicism, and several other religions, venerate Mary as a central figure in their faith, and she has been the subject of countless works of art over the centuries.
La Flotte has six months to remove the statue, the court said.
Mayor Jean-Paul Heraudeau said the discussion around the statue is “ridiculous” because it is “more of a memorial than a religious statue” and it is part of the town’s “historical heritage.”
(…) New York Post
Nearly 350 people gathered this Saturday around the statue of the Virgin of La Flotte-en-Ré, which must be moved by court order. Activists from former Presidential candidate Eric Zemmour’s party, practicing Catholics, and inhabitants of the town say they defend heritage and tradition.
Kneeling in front of the statue of the Virgin of La Flotte-en-Ré, the first demonstrators, around fifty, arrived well before the hour for a first religious gathering. First, they recited the rosary aloud, a litany that ends with these words: “ Let us pray for peace, and calmly so that a solution can be found without causing the displacement of this statue.”
“The Virgin is part of the village; she is part of our heritage,” says a demonstrator. “It’s a sign of our history; it has to stay there,” said a lady from Périgny, “ it’s our culture; it’s our religion.”
This statue of the Virgin Mary is a symbol, explains Stanislas Rigault, president of Generation Z “ what we are defending is this way our history is being attacked: there have been problems with statues of Napoleon, the ‘Archangel St Michel in Les Sables d’OIonne, it starts like this, and in the end, we are going to remove all the religious signs, we are going to remove all the martyrdom? Stop, it’s enough he shouts into a loudspeaker. “Stop touching our statues, stop touching our country, stop touching our roots, stop touching our values.”
