“THEY’ (you know who) have burnt done another Catholic Church in northern France. Who would hate Jesus enough to burn down a thousand churches a year ?”
And CNA 2021. Why France is losing one religious building every two weeks.
CNA 2021. Why France is losing one religious building every two weeks
One religious building is disappearing in France every two weeks.
That is the conclusion of Edouard de Lamaze, president of the Observatoire du patrimoine religieux (Observatory of Religious Heritage) in Paris.
He is raising the alarm in the French media about the gradual disappearance of religious edifices in a country known as the “eldest daughter of the Church” because the Frankish King Clovis I embraced Catholicism in 496.
Lamaze’s appeal for increased awareness came after a fire destroyed the 16th-century Church of Saint-Pierre in Romilly-la-Puthenaye, Normandy, northern France. The fire, deemed accidental, took place on April 15, exactly two years after the blaze that devastated Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris.
The unforgettable image of the burning cathedral, which circled the planet in 2019, pointed to a deeper issue within French society: serious shortcomings in the preservation system of religious monuments, coupled with increasing hostility toward religion.
Lamaze told CNA in an interview that in addition to one religious building disappearing every two weeks — by demolition, transformation, destruction by fire, or collapse — two-thirds of fires in religious buildings are due to arson.
While these statistics include buildings belonging to all religious groups, most of them concern Catholic monuments, which still represent a large majority in France, where there are roughly 45,000 Catholic places of worship.
Bell tower collapses
And October 2024. Over 100 churches burned to ashes in Canada.
Catholic Critique 