Two Catholic entrepreneurs have stirred controversy in western France with a plan to build hamlet communities for Catholic families who want to move to rural areas near local shrines.
Their company Monasphère (as in monastery) plans its first hamlet in L'Île-Bouchard, between Tours and Poitiers, where the site of a reported Marian apparition in 1947 attracts thousands of pilgrims annually.
Called Clos St. Gabriel (St. Gabriel Enclosure), it is a rectangular hamlet of 17 homes. Ungated, it resembles medieval settlements with houses built closely around squares, gardens and walkways. Monasphère says it has six or seven other sites in view already.
The idea was promptly criticised as a movement of fundamentalist Catholics and proof of “the increasingly growing influence of Anglo-Saxon marketing” that groups people according to their preferences.
France has traditionally rejected “communautarisme” - communitarianism - which it sees as dividing the nations into communities rather than treating all citizens equally. The accusation is frequently used against Muslims who advocate separate legal rules for Islam.
Monasphère defended its plan as not only for Catholics, but meant for urban families who wanted to follow a trend towards moving to rural areas and wanting to be near “a spiritual place”.
“We have no intention of creating a kibbutz,” one of the developers, Damien Thomas, told journalists. “It’s not reserved for Christians, there will be a mix."
But Monasphère’s own publicity stresses “the prophetic energy of places where Christians live in a fraternal neighbourhood” and says it wants to create “100 (such) oases over the next ten years.
In an interview with French Christian Radio, Thomas several times described the project as “Christian,” which is used as practically synonymous with “Catholic” in a country with only tiny minorities of other denominations.
L’Île-Bouchard’s mayor told a local newspaper she did not want to turn away 17 additional families at a time the village population was dwindling.
The daily La Croix said members of the Emmanuel Community, a charismatic new movement that has about half its roughly 12,000 members worldwide in France, administers the shrine and sold the plot for the hamlet to Monasphère.
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