Weird Granny Slater wrote:Surely it's absurd, even contre la révolution, for the secular French state to shoulder the financial burden for religious buildings.
.
See 1905 French law on the Separation of the Churches and the State.
In spite of the supposed separation of the state and religion, cathedrals remained the property of the state and smaller churches that of the local municipal government.
In essence this means that most Catholic churches, being built before 1905, are maintained by the 'state' - whereas more recent 'churches' Mormons and Mohammedans etc get nothing towards their upkeep.
Personally I find this a brilliant compromise and wish we had the same in the UK.
From Wiki:-
A few French politicians and communities have more recently questioned the law, arguing that, despite its explicit stance for state secularism, it de facto favors traditional French religions, in particular the Catholic Church, at the expense of more recently established religions, such as Islam. Indeed, most Roman Catholic churches in the country were built well before the enactment of the 1905 French law on the Separation of the Churches and the State, and thus are maintained at full public expense, although not always on time and to the extent that the church would like. With the exception of the historically anomalous Alsace-Lorraine, followers of Islam and other religions more recently implanted in France instead have to build and maintain religious facilities at their own expense. This was one of the arguments used by Nicolas Sarkozy, when he was Minister of Interior, to controversially argue in favour of funding other cultural centers than those of Catholicism, Protestantism and Judaism. In 2016, President Hollande proposed a temporary ban on foreign funding for mosques and shut down at least 20 mosques found to be "preaching radical Islamic ideology". These actions are consistent with Title V, Articles 26, 29, and 35 of the law.