In secular France, Catholic conservatism makes a comeback

The Washington Post reports:

Although France is renowned for strict prohibitions on religious displays in public spaces — notably on certain types of veils worn by many Muslim women — it is also a country of some 45,000 Catholic churches and one whose public holidays are almost exclusively Christian in origin. France does not keep statistics on race or religion, but a vast majority of its citizens are said to be either practicing Catholics or agnostics from Catholic backgrounds.

Some insist that France would not exist without the Catholic Church: The nation’s oft-invoked creation myth begins, after all, with the baptism of Clovis I, who united the kingdom of the Franks in the 6th century. And if the French Revolution of 1789 sought to banish religion from public life, it never eradicated religion from private life.


“We have a secular state but not a secular society,” said Matthieu Rougé, pastor of Paris’s St. Ferdinand des Ternes Catholic Church and an expert in political theology.

“The majority of the French are recognized as cultural Catholics. They may have studied in a Catholic school, they marry in churches, and they baptize their children. They are Catholic,” he said. “All our streets, the names of our towns and villages — everything is related in some way to the Catholic faith.”

The historical facts about France.