Another priest removed from a state school ” “

After the removal of a priest from a state lycée in Toulon, protests continue against the presence of Catholic chaplains in state schools in France. One such protest was in the “Georges-Cormier” lycée at Coulommiers where some teachers – supported by the Union of Lay Families – signed a petition to ask that the chaplaincy be closed. The French Catholic daily “La Croix” has denounced this new case. As for Father Antoine Galand in Toulon, the teachers of the secondary school in Coulommiers rest their case on the new law that prohibits the display of religious signs in public places, and hence also in schools. According to these teachers, “the use of the cassock in a state school building is an attack on the law on secularism”. On the question, the daily La Croix has sounded out the view of Marylise Leterne, in charge of chaplaincies in the diocese of Meux, of which the town of Coulommiers forms part. First, she says, the law in question does not concern chaplaincies. And second, the priest in Coulommiers has never worn the soutane in school. “We – she adds – are in a position of legality. If someone has problems, they have them not with us but with the law. We are careful not to cause provocation. We have always considered that we guests in schools and respected their rules”. The Catholic daily points out that the legislation is “fairly clear” on this question: the creation of a chaplaincy in a state school is possible where parents request it. It is not therefore by chance if at Toulon and Coulommiers, the teachers who requested the closure of the chaplaincy and the removal of the two priests, did so not on the basis of this right, but in the light of the new law that prohibits the display of religious symbols in public places, thus criticising not the action of the two priests but the use of the cassock in schools. The episodes of Toulon and Coulommiers – continues La Croix – are not in fact isolated. In his keynote address to the plenary assembly in Lourdes, the president of the French episcopate, Archbishop Jean-Pierre Ricard, dedicated an entire paragraph to the question. “The law that prohibits students from displaying religious signs in public schools – he said – is having a number of indirect effects in our social life. The fear of a fundamentalist Islam is often accompanied by a wish to restrict the expressions of religious freedom on all religions”.