PARIS (LifeSiteNews) — To mark the 120th anniversary of a 1905 law which inaugurated the separation of Church and state this week, the President of France delivered a national address praising the country’s secular framework on the same date that historically initiated significant conflict between the French government and the Catholic Church.
The speech, aimed to rally citizens to republican ideals, was broadcast from the Élysée Palace on December 9 and commemorated the legislation that redefined the legal and institutional role of religion in public life.
From his desk in the Salon Doré, President Emmanuel Macron claimed the 1905 law is central to contemporary French liberties. He praised the fact the secular settlement “does not impose any belief on the citizen” and remains “neutral; it does not distinguish between consciences, thus making them free.”
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In his remarks, Macron asserted that the “secular Republic” means France does not represent “an identity born of cultural, religious, or particular origins,” and praised the 1905 law as “the fulfilment of the French Revolution.”
The president linked the law closely to France’s education system, saying public schooling was “inseparable from secularism” and provided “a positive knowledge free from any religious, cultural, or identity assignment.”
Further emphasizing the role of teachers in transmitting this secular curriculum, Macron paid tribute to Samuel Paty and Dominique Bernard, who were killed in Islamist attacks, calling them “illuminating examples” of the values the Republic seeks to defend.
The president did not mention the case of Father Jacques Hamel, who was the victim of a high-profile, religiously-motivated Islamist terror attack in 2016, when his throat was slit by two Muslim attackers while celebrating Mass.
Macron – who began his career as an investment banker with Rothschild & Co. – further insisted that the Republic must remain “vigilant” against attempts by extremist groups that would threaten this framework and that “preserving the 1905 law, the school, and with it, secularism, means preserving our freedom, each individual’s freedom, and therefore everyone’s freedom.”
The Catholic Church historically took a different view when the law first came into force. Two months after its enactment, in February 1906, Pope St. Pius X issued the encyclical Vehementer Nos which condemned the statute as a rupture in France’s historic relationship with the Holy See. The pope said the law had “violently severed the age-old ties by which your nation was united to the Apostolic See” and called the event “disastrous for civil society as for religion.”
The encyclical rejected the principle of Church-state separation as an “absolutely false thesis, a very pernicious error.” Pius X argued that the legislation placed the Church “under the domination of civil power” by transferring the administration of religious property to lay associations regulated by the state, leaving bishops and clergy without legal control over churches, seminaries, or parish goods.
The saintly pontiff warned that the law’s provisions “trample” long-established ecclesiastical property rights by declaring pre-Revolution churches to be state or municipal property.
Following the implementation of the 1905 law, French Catholics experienced severe limitations on their freedom to worship, alongside incursions by the state toward Church assets and personnel.
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Historians record that between 1901 and 1906, the government’s earlier religious association laws led to the exile of thousands of members of religious orders and the closure of most Catholic schools across France. These expulsions and suppressions were referenced by Pius X, who described “the dispersal and disbanding of religious orders, and the rejection of their members … to utter destitution.”
Soldiers invaded la Grande Chartreuse, the iconic mother house of the ascetic and contemplative Carthusian order, and forcibly closed the monastery down, expelling its religious brothers. Religious houses across the nation experienced governmental interference.
During this period, religious symbols were removed from courts and public buildings. Religious instruction was restricted in schools. Catholic charitable institutions such as hospitals were seized by the state and frequently not returned. Pius X summarized these measures in his encyclical, listing “the secularization of schools and hospitals,” the removal of clerics’ academic exemptions from military service, and the prohibition of “any act or emblem that could, in any way, evoke religion” in public institutions.
As France marked the anniversary, Macron presented the 1905 law as an essential element of national cohesion and contemporary freedoms. Historical documents issued by the Catholic Church at the time of its passage, however, describe the measures as a forcible break with France’s civilizational and religious inheritance and records the law as a catalyst for a series of breaches by the state of Christians’ freedoms of property, education, and religious observance.
