Not Cultus but Culture

22.08.2019

On June 17 this year, the French newspaper, L’Opinion, carried an interview with Jean-Philippe Hubsch, the most senior leader of the Freemasons in France. Turning to the tragic fire that almost destroyed Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris last April, Hubsch proposed that it should be rebuilt as a “public temple of culture”, and so removed from the Catholic Church’s use as a place to worship God. This proposal, ignored in our media, recalls the French Revolution in 1793 when the ministers of the new atheistic religion celebrated the Feast of Reason in Notre Dame, enthroning an actress as the Goddess of Liberty. The Freemasons haven’t changed in two hundred years. Under French law, all church buildings built before 1905 belong to the state, and that includes the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. This followed the Laicité law of Emile Combes, enforcing the separation of church and state in secular France.