A member of La Police Rurale turned up this week and asked us to move the cars from in front of the church, so a truck could back up to its door.
He was accompanied by three municipal workers eager to start filling the truck with stuff from the church.
They went to work, stripping the interior of the church of its statues and artifacts,
An anxious Mary
and stacking the pews ready for transporting.
The dismounted statues began to resemble the cast of a episode of a religious costume drama– casually chatting while waiting to be called on set!
What was happening was not a total surprise to us. I would have a couple of questions for our local “bobby”…
Two weeks ago the same policeman told our friend Deming–who was cat sitting for us while were in Strasbourg and speaks fluent French–that the church’s demolition was imminent!
Poor Deming, assuming we knew this was going to happen, e-mailed us the news.
It was a bolt from the blue–we had no inkling that there was such a plan or that it’s execution was imminent!
The idea that this large presence–so much part of our lives and the landscape–would vanish, was a real shock.
Could it be true? Surely not…
Pulling the church down would be a hugely disrupting procedure. It would be expensive for the Mairie (churches in France are the property of the State)–and politically delicate. To spend so much money on pulling down an old church, money that might otherwise be invested in more deserving causes, would be controversial to say the least. It would also greatly upset not a few of the Mayor’s voting constituents many of whom still had family links with the parish.
NIMBY* thoughts started creeping into our paranoid minds.
What would be put in its place?
Would they sell the land for construction? Surely not.
(The Mayor had assured us two years ago that the church was not for sale when someone asked to buy it for a domestic conversion–Ce n’est pas a vendre!)
We live in an 18th century présbytère–the priest’s house, the vicarage–though it’s 90 years since a priest was living here–but our neighbours remember walking across the fields barefoot as youngsters to learn their catechism in what is now our kitchen.
The church stands just to southwest side of the courtyard and outside it, behind the pigeonnier.
It was built in the 1860s. The original place of worship was partially destroyed at the time of the revolution. It is attached to the main house and is now our utility room, a storage space and a mess!
When we bought the house in 1990, the “new” church was still being used twice a year for services–on Easter Monday and at Toussaint (All Saints Day, November 1st).
Occasionally there would be a funeral involving one of the local families, whose tombs stand in the little cemetery.
But some years ago a crack appeared in one of the side chapels and the Mairie in Lautrec pronounced the building unsafe.
It was locked and no service has been held inside since.
Interested locals–including us–formed an association to try to find a way of at least securing the safety of the building and thus preserving it. (I was the unlikely choice for Vice President–a heartbeat away from the Presidency!).
We had no luck.
The crack has widened every winter…
…but the church has stood defiant–against the odds.
We had persuaded ourselves that that was the way it would stay.
Until the email from Deming appeared in the in-box!
On our return, we immediately rang all our neighbors, desperate–well keen–to find someone who might be able to shed some light on the mystery.
No one had heard a word about it!
Our friend Myriam promised to ask her sister-in-law, a member of the ruling group on the council, if it was true that they were planning to demolish the church.
The next day a beaming Myriam had the answer.
NO, emphatically, NO–of course they were not going to demolish the church.
They were simply planning, very sensibly and not before time, one might say, to remove everything of value from the building.
That was what was IMMINENT and what was happening that morning.
Dites-moi, Monsieur, I said to the policeman, after moving the cars,
Vous avez dit a notre amie la semaine dernière qu’ils vont démolir l’église? [You told our friend last week that there are plans to demolish the church?]
Mais non! Monsieur, non! non! he replied–just a beat too fast, I thought. Elle m’avait mal compris! [No! no! she misunderstood me!]
I’m willing to lay a bet on who got the wrong end of the Bishop’s crook!
*Not In My Back Yard
Robin Ellis 