Catholic churches in France have a bad landlord: the French government

A notable and unsettling trait of most French churches is the number of statues with their heads lobbed off.

Admittedly, upon reflection, it’s not surprising those statues came out of the French Revolution badly, notes an article today in Spectator Life. The Church and its clerics weren’t popular. But it was nearly 250 years ago. How come the heads haven’t been put back on? It seems lax of the Church authorities, to say the least.

After all, the Church in France, whose roots go back to the Apostolic Age when Jesus’s disciples set forth after his death to spread his message and landed in Gaul, is often referred to as fille aînée de l'Église, the "eldest daughter of the Church”.

There’s also, as alluded to above, something unsettling about a statue with its head taken off. Sure, it’s just a piece of stone. But it represents something. It stands for more than just the stone of its parts. When it comes to the headless statues adorning churches all over France, they represent important bishops, martyrs, saints, the Catholic Faith; the struggle for freedom of conscience and to believe in something beyond this vale of tears and cold rational reasoning.

But, it turns out, the Church actually has little power over the state of its decrepit churches.  
There are about 32,000 churches, 6,000 chapels and 87 cathedrals in France, according to a Ministry of Culture survey from the 1980s.

Church buildings built before 1905 are owned by the State, including almost all the country’s great cathedrals, such as Notre-Dame – hence the interest and involvement of the country’s president, Emmanuel Macron, in the rebuilding of the country’s most famous cathedral after that terrible fire. Parish churches built before 1905 are typically owned by local municipalities (known as communes).  

The strange arrangement goes back to 1790, when the revolutionary government appropriated the Church’s property. Subsequently, many of its churches and monasteries were destroyed, abandoned or turned into barns, armouries or military barracks, notes the Jesuit Review.    

But after Napoleon Bonaparte came to power in 1801, he signed an agreement between the Vatican and the French government that allowed the Church to resume its normal functions in France, which included it reclaiming many of its properties. Religious life was, in effect, restored in the country.  

However, the beginning of the 20th century “marked another swing toward aggressive secularisation and a government strongly hostile to Church and faith”, states the Jesuit Review. The passage of a law in 1905 established laïcité, enshrining secularisation of the State. A bitter struggle followed between the Church and the State, including the breakdown of diplomatic relations between the Holy See and France.

Eventually a compromise was reached: the State would own churches built before 1905 but “had to provide financially for their upkeep and allow them to be used freely and without cost by the Church”.

But while the famous cathedrals in cities such as Paris and Marseilles are likely to get taken care of, based on what any visitor to churches in rural France will see, the State hasn’t kept up its side of the bargain in the majority of cases. In addition to headless statues, moss and vegetation grows out of the walls of many churches. Sitting down on a pew you may well find yourself sliding off due to it irregular angle.

Fortunately, there is Vézelay to remind you what Catholic France is all about. The small town in Bourgogne is built around what is known as the Eternal Hill. Atop it sits the Basilica of Sainte-Marie-Madeleine. That in itself is noteworthy, being named after Mary Magdalene, the woman who is often portrayed as a woman of ill repute – she wasn’t – and who featured so prominently in the controversial 1988 film The Last Temptation of Christ directed by Martin Scorsese.      

Almost a thousand years old, the Basilica is a masterpiece of medieval cathedral building, as evidenced by the interplay between solar light and architecture during the summer and winter solstices.

The clever medieval designers built this 12th-century basilica so that during the summer solstice (21 June) the sun light coming through the basilica windows creates pools of lights on the stone floor proceeding in a straight line up the centre of the nave to the altar.      

On the winter solstice (21 December), the sun’s light comes in at an angle that illuminates decorative capitals atop the columns to the side of the nave – and which are too high and dark to see at other times – revealing their strange, ornate stone images carved out of the whacky, cosmic breadth of the medieval imagination.     

The medieval age is often depicted by us moderns as bland and backward. But its inhabitants created some of the finest buildings ever to grace the earth as they sought to understand our role in the cosmic dance. In contrast, those caught up in the supposed progress of reason during the Revolution and accompanying Enlightenment couldn’t do better than knocking off the heads of statues built by their ancestors.        

Such “progress” continues, along with its subsequent fallout for the Catholic Faith in France. Sometimes it’s as stark as when Fr Jacques Hamel was murdered in 2016 during Mass by having his throat slit by Islamic terrorists. Or it’s more subtle as during the Olympics’ opening ceremony with the was-it-wasn’t-it parody of the Last Supper, festooned with drag queens and LGBT cant.  

At best, it is fair to say, while the excesses of the Revolution are unlikely to be repeated, the French State remains far from a fan of the Catholic Church. That the former has ownership of the latter’s crucial infrastructure is unsettling – and inconvenient, as you keep sliding forward during Mass off a strangely tilting pew – to say the least.

Fortunately in the likes of Vézelay, one is able to escape this strange contradiction amid its reception of solar light and architectural acknowledgement of forces beyond our realm.

Photo: A photograph taken on August 13, 2025 shows workers using a crane to lower the crown of the monumental statue of the Notre-Dame de la Garde Basilica in Marseille to display it in the basilica for visitors before it is sent for restoration. (Photo by MIGUEL MEDINA/AFP via Getty Images.)

‍