A nativity scene in a French town hall has sparked protests against its apparent violation of the country’s secularism laws.
The centre-Right mayor of Beziers, in southern France, has gone ahead with the Christmas display despite public buildings in France being banned from using religious iconography.
Demonstrators gathered outside the town hall in southern France on Saturday booing and whistling Robert Ménard, the mayor.
The French can be so irritating.
Balanced on a tractor fork, the crucified Christ rises. Those gathered to watch sing hymns, gazing up at a five-metre cross towering above them as it is lowered into a stone plinth on the roadside.
The scene is not common in a nation where the separation of church and state was enshrined under a 1905 law that made it illegal to erect new religious symbols in public spaces.
Well done. But late to the field?
The political consequences of turning to the dark side.
“It should not surprise the person alerted to spiritual realities that in an age of atheism diverse forms of the religion of Satanism have sprung up all over the world and are gaining followers at a rapid rate.” So wrote the late Catholic priest Vincent P. Miceli in his 1981 book, The Antichrist: The Final Campaign Against the Savior, recently republished by Sophia Institute Press, with observations about secularism’s evils highly pertinent forty years later.
Scholars rightly take umbrage when pundits and activists exploit their work for political purposes. The latest example, at least in religious circles, is the way in which a new book, “Secular Surge: A New Fault Line in American Politics,” is being received by militant secularists.
