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A French court ordered a small town to remove a statue of the Virgin Mary that had been erected at a crossroads. Photo/RTE
PARIS – French court orders a small town to remove a statue Virgin Mary . The reason is that religious displays violate the separation of church and state.
The statue is located at a crossroads in La Flotte, a town of 2,800 residents on the popular holiday island of Ile-de-Re, off France’s Atlantic coast.
The statue was erected by a local family after World War II in gratitude for the return of a father and son from the conflict alive.
The site was originally a park, but the family that owned it later donated the site to city authorities with a statue of the Virgin Mary erected at a crossroads in 1983.
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In 2020, the statue was damaged by a passing car, and local authorities decided to restore the statue and return it to the same place, but this time on an elevated platform.
The move sparked a legal complaint by La Libre Pensee 17, an association dedicated to defending secularity, on the basis that French laws dating back to 1905 prohibit religious monuments in public spaces.
The court in Poitiers followed the argument as did, on appeal, the regional court in Bordeaux, ordered the municipal authorities of La Flotte to remove the statue.
Local mayor Jean-Paul Heraudeau called the discussion around the statue “ridiculous” because, he said, it was part of the city’s “historical heritage” and should be considered “more a memorial than a religious statue”.
But while the court accepted that the authorities had not intended to reveal any religious preferences, it also said that “the Virgin Mary is an important figure in Christianity”, giving her an “inherently religious character”.
According to Catholic doctrine in the New Testament, God chose Mary to give birth to Jesus while she was still a virgin.
Catholics, and some other religions, venerate Mary as a central figure in their faith, and she has been the subject of countless works of art over the centuries.
The city authorities of La Flotte, as quoted by AFP, Saturday (14/1/2023), have six months to move the statue.
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