Religion
Perhaps the most striking of the legal differences between France and Alsace-Moselle is the absence in Alsace-Moselle of a separation of church and state, even though a constitutional right of freedom of religion is guaranteed by the French government. Alsace-Moselle is still governed by a pre-1905 law established by the Concordat of 1801 which provides for the public subsidy of the Roman Catholic Church, the Lutheran Church, the Calvinist Church and the Jewish religion, as well as providing for public education in these faiths; although parents are allowed to refuse religious education for their children. The clergy for these religions are paid for by the state. Catholic bishops are named by the President of the French Republic following proposal by the Pope. The public University of Strasbourg has courses in theology and is famous for its teaching of Protestant theology.
This situation is unusual in a country like France where church and state are more strictly separated than in most other nations. There is debate over whether the second largest religion in France, Islam, should enjoy comparable status with the four official religions.
Read more about this topic: Local Law In Alsace-Moselle
Famous quotes containing the word religion:
“In the latter part of the seventeenth century, according to the historian of Dunstable, “Towns were directed to erect ‘a cage’ near the meeting-house, and in this all offenders against the sanctity of the Sabbath were confined.” Society has relaxed a little from its strictness, one would say, but I presume that there is not less religion than formerly. If the ligature is found to be loosened in one part, it is only drawn the tighter in another.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.”
—Leslie Fiedler (b. 1917)