SW News: For residents of the French town of La Flotte-en-Re on the Ile-de-Re island, March 3 was a day of mourning. On that day, the Poitiers administrative court sealed the fate of a beautiful decades-old statue of Our Lady overlooking a crossroad in the town. The court ruled that the municipality has to remove the statute within six months as it has been “illegally erected on its public domain.

It was the anti-clerical and rabidly secular outfit named Libre Pensee that took cudgels against the sacred image citing the 1905 law that prohibits any religious monuments or symbols on public spaces. The statue triggered a controversy after the municipality reinstalled it on the pedestal after it was knocked down by a vehicle that rammed into it in 2020. When it was repaired and installed in December last year, the Libre Pensee raised a hue and cry and filed a lawsuit. It was in 1983 that the Virgin Mary’s statue was moved to its current location.

Earlier, it was kept in a private garden after the end of the Second World War as a thanksgiving token for the safe return of many young men conscripted for battle from the town. Decrying the court order, Mayor Jean-Paul Heraudeau told French Catholic publication Famille Chretienne “This statue is the history of the village. People are unanimous: they do not understand why this statue should be moved.”

More than 20,000 residents had signed a petition for allowing the sacred image to remain in place. Last month, Francois Xavier Bellamy, a Catholic lawmaker and pro-life supporter, had visited the island and had expressed solidarity with the residents of the town who wish the statue to remain. The MP said, “It is in the name of the freedom to transmit that we must defend these monuments which are threatened today.” The mayor said that had not the statue been damaged in the motor accident it would have remained so without any issues.