Islam, secularism… what Bruno Retailleau says on these religious subjects

Bruno Retailleau, Minister of the Interior in charge of religious affairs, has a reputation for being a practicing Catholic, even if he does not speak openly about his personal faith. However, religious issues have often appeared in his speeches and positions throughout his political career.

► Eastern Christians

Bruno Retailleau has often spoken out to draw attention to the situation of Christians in the Near and Middle East. In 2010, after the attack on the Baghdad Cathedral, he signed a platform alongside 60 other parliamentarians asking the Minister of Foreign Affairs to intervene with the authorities of the Middle Eastern countries concerned, “to ask them to take special security measures around places frequented by Christians during the Christmas period, so that this feast day does not become a new day of mourning.”

On December 6, 2016, as president of the Senate’s liaison, reflection, vigilance and solidarity group with Eastern Christians, Senator Retailleau presented a proposed resolution requesting the recognition of “crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes committed against ethnic and religious minorities and civilian populations in Syria and Iraq” by Daesh. Atrocities that he went to see on site at the beginning of 2018. “They ransacked the churches with terrible meticulousness. They did not just burn them, they destroyed the images with chisels, sometimes carved centuries ago in the stone. Their objective was clear: to annihilate the people as much as their culture.”he detailed to the Figaro after a stay in Iraq in the Nineveh plain, meeting Christians who survived the Islamic State.

In February 2023, with his colleague Senator Valérie Boyer, Bruno Retailleau tabled a motion for a resolution for France to recognize the Assyrian-Chaldean genocide. It was voted on in the Senate on Wednesday, February 8, 2023. Between 1915 and 1918, approximately 250,000 Syriacs were exterminated by the Ottoman Empire, along with the Armenians.

► Christian roots of France

In December 2014, President of the Vendée General Council, Bruno Retailleau opposed, in the name of ” our cultural roots and our popular traditions “, to the decision of the administrative court of Nantes to prohibit the presence of a Christmas crib in the hall of the general council building. “I remind all the ayatollahs of secularism that secularism is the distancing of the public space from religious fact. Not from cultural fact.»he explains in a column published by The Figaro December 4. For Bruno Retailleau, “The symbol of the nativity scene goes beyond the religious symbol. It is part of a common heritage that brings us together, well beyond the convictions of each individual. The Christian roots of France are not a postulate of faith. They are an observation of reality. Cultural reality, as our artists and artisans have drawn their inspiration from the world of Christmas.” The administrative court of appeal of Nantes finally annulled this judgment in 2015, which Bruno Retailleau considers “a legal and political victory.”

In 2019, the disruption of a live nativity scene in Toulouse by protesters “anti-capitalists” provokes, among many political reactions, that of Bruno Retailleau, then president of the LR group in the Senate. He sees in this event “the ultimate stage of stupidity” And “the alliance of ignorance and sectarianism.”

► Secularism

In January 2017, while Manuel Valls was worried about the candidacy of François Fillon, declaring that “ for the first time, a candidate defines his project as Catholic”, Bruno Retailleau, supporter of the LR candidate, responds on air France Inter : “It’s terrible, this kind of secularism experienced as a fight against religion.” “It’s not a defect to declare oneself a Christian, adds the senator from Vendée. To say that one is a Christian, at one time or another, is not to offend the principle of secularism. The principle of secularism is the neutrality of the State, to ensure that one can believe or not believe, that religions can coexist, that’s all.. »

In 2018, when some people in France were protesting against Emmanuel Macron going to Rome to receive the title of honorary canon of the Lateran Basilica, Bruno Retailleau reacted in The Crossspecifying his conception of secularism: “In France, unfortunately, we still make a double confusion between secularism and secularity on the one hand, and between worship and culture on the other. As much as worship is limited by the law of 1905, culture can accommodate the historical and patrimonial marks of Christianity. When a President of the Republic goes to Rome to receive the title of Canon of the Lateran, it is cultural and political at the same time.. »

► Radical Islam and separatism

In 2019, the president of the LR group in the Senate, Bruno Retailleau, tabled a bill aimed at preventing community lists in elections. In April 2021, while the bill on separatism was being examined in the Senate, he had an amendment of the same vein adopted, prohibiting “to hold in public places (…) statements contrary to the principles of national sovereignty, democracy or secularism intended to support the demands of a section of the people based on ethnic origin or religious affiliation.” ” The Senate has largely rewritten the “separatism” law to give it strength and target radical Islam “, Bruno Retailleau then assumes in a tweet.

The Vendée senator had reacted to the assassination, on August 9, 2021, of Father Olivier Mairein Saint-Laurent-sur-Sèvre, emphasizing “the depth of faith” of this priest whom he knew well.