Notre-Dame ‘both secular and religious’ site for the nation  

A “huge economic effort” was put into the restoration of the cathedral by the state.

In France, there are some very poor churches, so laïcité is “not an ideal” funding model that other countries should adopt, a Tablet webinar on the re-opening of Notre-Dame Cathedral and the significance to the Catholic Church was told.

Tom Heneghan, Paris correspondent for The Tablet and author of the soon to be published book, Faith, Hope and Paris, about St Joseph’s Church, the English language Catholic parish in Paris run by the Passionists, said laïcité cannot be exported without exporting the turbulent fraught political history that produced it.

Referring to the motivation for the 1905 law on the separation of the Church and State in France which has resulted in the state owning 95 per cent of France’s 42,000 Catholic churches and 140 of the country’s cathedrals, he said proponents of the law felt the Church was so powerful that it had to have its economic basis and church buildings taken from it.

However, “if you talk to a French bishop today, they say they are very happy to have laïcité because the state has to provide for the upkeep of the buildings”.

Nevertheless, he highlighted that there are some “very, very poor churches” and that a mayor can say they do not have any money in their budget to fix a church roof, and “sometimes [churches] can go to ruin like that” or they are left without funding for anti-theft measures resulting in paintings and statues being stolen.

Professor Renée Köhler-Ryan of the University of Notre Dame Australia, sponsors of the webinar, noted that Philippe Villeneuve, the chief architect on Notre-Dame Cathedral’s restoration following the devastating fire of April 2019, had said that because of laïcité he wasn’t allowed to talk about his faith while he was working on the project.

Yet there had been a “huge economic effort” put into the restoration of the cathedral by the state. Notre-Dame was both a secular monument and a religious site for the nation.  

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