Church’s Eldest Daughter Collapsing

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TRANSCRIPT

Between neglect, hatred and anti-Catholic bigotry, churches in France are being destroyed at an alarming rate.

Demolition, collapse, transformation, or fire are decimating one church every week.

This is according to Édouard de Lamaze, president of the Observatory of Religious Heritage, stationed in Paris.

Édouard de Lamaze: "We lose a religious edifice every 15 days in France. And every year, we have nearly 750 acts of vandalism on religious sites, that is to say, an act of vandalism at least every day, mainly for the churches ... ."
 
In a recent interview, Lamaze calculated robbers or desecrators target more than two Christian monuments every day.

He explained, of France's nearly 45,000 Catholic sites, 15,000 are protected as historic monuments.

But the remaining 30,000 are not.

And while dilapidation from age and disrepair account for some of the fires, Lamaze lamented two-thirds of them are from arson.

Some historic churches that were engulfed in flames in the last few years include the medieval cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris, the 15th-century cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul in Nantes and the 17th-century church of Saint-Sulpice in Paris.

According to a 2020 report by Soeren Kern of the Gatestone Institute: "The perpetrators of anti-Christian attacks — which include acts of arson, defecation, desecration, looting, mockery, profanation, satanism, theft, urination and vandalism — are rarely caught."

Moreover, for each Catholic site rapidly disappearing, by at least one every 15 days, Islamic mosques are steadily being erected at the same rate, one every 15 days.

While Catholic church buildings in France are in decline, so is the country's Catholic birth rate.  

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