← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · friedrich braun
Thread ID: 17643 | Posts: 4 | Started: 2005-04-04
2005-04-04 19:23 | User Profile
[I]Anything that angers Europe's leftist scumbags can't be all bad. [/I]
French flag tribute to Pope sparks left-wing anger
PARIS, April 4 (Reuters) - As Catholics mourned the death of Pope John Paul, French leftwingers and a major teaching union criticised the government on Monday for ordering flags on public buildings to be lowered in a sign of respect.
Socialist senator Jean-Luc Melenchon and Yves Contassot, a senior Green party member on the Paris City Council, said the government had abused its powers in ordering the official tribute to the Pope, who died on Saturday.
The Unsa union said the government was guilty of double standards having ordered schools to take part in the tribute to a religious leader while having banned Muslim headscarves in state schools in a drive to keep schools firmly secular.
"Let the Christians pay tribute to the head of their church, it's a private matter," Contassot told France Inter radio.
"Today, we have a government and a head of state who, clearly, for political reasons, are trying to take advantage of an issue that is a private matter," he said.
Lowering of flags on all state buildings was "totally out of place and at the limit of legality."
Once so Catholic it was known as the "elder daughter of the Church," France has imposed a strict separation of church and state for 100 years to keep religion from provoking the bloody strife it sparked in previous centuries.
While the leaders of most major political parties have avoided comment, the row underscores the unpopular government's weakness as it struggles to convince hostile voters to back the European Union constitution in a referendum next month.
Millions of French are Roman Catholics, and there has been a public outpouring of grief over the Pope's death.
But Melenchon told Europe 1 radio the state was duty bound to observe a strict neutrality and that the flag tribute was a "favour awarded to one particular religion."
In a statement, the teachers' union Unsa said the order "to mark the death of a foreign head of state is unusual and constitutionally counter to our principles when it is a question of a representative of a church."
CUSTOM
Interior Minister Dominique de Villepin defended the government's move, saying the lowering of the flag was one of the "Republican customs" when a pope died.
"They have been applied at the occasion of the deaths of Pius XII, John XXIII and John Paul I," the interior ministry said in a statement.
A spokesman for Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin said France also ordered its flags lowered in 1991 on the death of Norway's King Olaf V and in 1989 when Japanese Emperor Hirohito died.
"It's a republican tradition ... that applies to heads of state in office with which France has special relations or is friendly," the official said.
"The Pope is head of the Catholic Church and head of the Vatican City State" and flags would again be at half mast on Friday when the Pontiff is buried.
é Copyright Reuters Ltd. All rights reserved. The information contained In this news report may not be published, broadcast or otherwise distributed without the prior written authority of Reuters Ltd.
04/04/2005 14:34 RTR [url]http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/ns/news/story.jsp?id=2005040414340002831097&dt=20050404143400&w=RTR&coview=[/url]
2005-04-04 20:04 | User Profile
Outside of a few Leftist cranks, no one in France would even second guess the lowering of the tricolor in respect to the Pope's death, including high ranking politicians like Raffarin and Villepin. The newsmedia finds ways to publish this meaningless story just to smear the French while ignoring the fact that the Pope visited France the most out of all foreign countries he visited.
2005-04-04 20:46 | User Profile
[QUOTE=xmetalhead]Outside of a few Leftist cranks, no one in France would even second guess the lowering of the tricolor in respect to the Pope's death, including high ranking politicians like Raffarin and Villepin. The newsmedia finds ways to publish this meaningless story just to smear the French while ignoring the fact that the Pope visited France the most out of all foreign countries he visited.[/QUOTE] X, I, too, respect the French a great deal, and I have no patience with the neocons France-bashing. However, for good or for ill, France has been the birthplace of much of Western ideology, and since the Enlightenment, that most definitely includes a strong strain of anti-Christian thought.
2005-04-04 21:34 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Quantrill]X, I, too, respect the French a great deal, and I have no patience with the neocons France-bashing. However, for good or for ill, France has been the birthplace of much of Western ideology, and since the Enlightenment, that most definitely includes a strong strain of anti-Christian thought.[/QUOTE]Certainly so. It stands to reason how the Catholic Church in France is dying out.
Signal lesson also - Catholicism seems to have always done best in those countries where it faced real competition, even some repression, like Poland and Ireland. Where it artificially gained maintained a state monopoly, like in France and Czeckoslovokia, it gained the state but lost the people, or maybe in a sense, gained the world but lost, if not its soul, all the souls around it.