The Religious Persecution in France 1900-1906Brodhead, J. Napier (Jane Napier)
History
The Religious Persecution in France 1900-1906
Brodhead, J. Napier (Jane Napier)
Catholic Church -- France; Church and state -- France
Whence this unseemly haste to vote a measure so important on the ragged
edge of a legislature? Next month one-third of the Senate is to be
renewed, the presidential term expires, and in May general elections are
to take place. In vain the Right, in learned and eloquent speeches,
adjured the Senate to postpone the final vote: (1) till one-third of the
Senators had been replaced; (2) till the Municipal Councils had been
consulted; (3) till the country had been consulted; (4) until after the
general elections of May, 1906. All in vain. “_Motions préjudicielles_”
and a hundred odd amendments all had the same fate.
The explanation of this “scandalous haste” is very simple. The reporter
of the Commission said: “If you do not vote this liberal law now, you
can say good-bye to it, for you will never see it again.”
The country has never been consulted, and the Government wishes to
confront the people with the _accomplished_ fact, and above all to be
able to say, as I pointed out in my last: “You see the law is voted and
nothing is changed.” If this law had been passed two years ago, it would
have gone into operation a year before the general elections and the
people might have been roused. On the other hand, if it hung fire now,
it would certainly have to be placed in all the electoral programmes.
Everything has been planned and foreseen by the lodges since twenty
years.[14]
Several senators of the Right convincingly established that there was no
adequate reason for this unseemly haste--that no organic law had ever
been passed without a second reading; and they adjured the Senate not to
abdicate. M. de Chamaillard even offered to withdraw all the proposed
amendments (about a hundred) if the Senate would not vote the “urgency”
and give the law a second reading. All in vain.
No one ignores or denies that the true purpose of the law is to
dechristianize France; even the spokesmen of the Government could not
dissimulate the truth. The coterie of Freemason Jacobins who have ruled
France for the past twenty years have not renounced their scheme of
national schismatic churches; only, instead of having one, which was
seen to be impossible, they propose to establish dozens of them by means
of associations of worship. Articles 4, 6, 8, 19 dealing with these
associations contain the whole venom of the law. In vain the
obscurities, the anomalies, the legal antinomies were pointed out, and
explanations demanded. _Règlements d’organization and Conseil d’Etat_,
it was said, would settle everything later on! In this _Review_, August
19th, I commented on the text of the law--and not one word, not one
comma, has been changed by the Senate!
To-day, Islamism is, _ipso facto_, the only religion recognized by the
French Government; its ministers and mosques and schools are provided
for, and its ceremonies are often honoured by the presence of state
officials. This, in spite of Article 2, “the Republic recognizes and
subventions no worship.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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