‘Secular’ France is subsidising religion with billions of euros
The avowed intention of French Prime Minister Nicolas Sarkozy to undermine the French separation of Church and State is going on at local level, too.
Despite a legal ban on the financing of religion (the famous law of 1905, which separated church and state, says: “The Republic neither recognises, nor salaries, nor subsidises any religion.”) a new report has discovered that 30% of funding for new mosques in France can be traced back to the public coffers.
These subsidies are often linked to local election campaigns, when mayors will hive off municipal land for notional prices (often one euro) to Islamic groups seeking to build mosques. The mechanism is the so-called “emphyteutic lease” which permits local authorities to lease land at minimal rents if the lessee promises to make improvements. Only occasionally are these agreements uncovered, and the courts punish local authorities for agreeing rents that are too low and amounting to subsidising religion. Such cases have been seen in Marseille and Montreuil.
A lawsuit challenging the Marseille agreement ended with the rent being increased to €24,000. The Montreuil lease was struck down in 2007, but an appeals court overturned the decision, contending that the symbolic amount is not a subsidy because the grounds and mosque will revert to government control in 2107. (That’s 2107).
Ironically, the 1905 statute is used to argue for public support of mosques. That law ended the funding of faith groups and made their buildings the property of the state, which now maintains them. But critics assert that this favours Catholicism, whose pre-1905 churches were built with government aid, over Islam, whose late-arriving adherents bear the full cost of constructing and caring for new mosques. This is what is motivating Sarkozy to propose changes to the law.
France has been famed for its strict secularity. It banned the wearing of religious symbols in schools, but now seems to be bending the 1905 law to accommodate Muslims. If the law is modified to take into account the new circumstances, it is unlikely to be changed to the detriment of the Catholic Church, but more likely that their privileges will be extended to Islam.
A report in 2007 by a coalition of French secularist organisations demonstrated that the French State pays billions of euros to support religion.
16 January 2009