Church in France: The Church's Finances Decline
During the presentation of its annual financial report, the Conference of Bishops of France explained that it had lost nearly 40% of its resources for the year 2020 alone: due to the Covid-19 epidemic, the Church was not able to benefit from its main sources of income, donations.
The serious tone, Ambroise Laurent, Deputy Secretary General of the Conference of Bishops of France (CEF), evokes “a veritable financial shock” in his December 9, 2020 videoconference.
Being the one who is also in charge of the economic, social, and legal questions of the episcopate, he compares the closure of churches, during the first two confinements, to a “double punishment, spiritual and financial.”
Indeed, the faithful not being able to assemble during Sunday Masses, or for the celebration of certain sacraments - baptisms, marriages – has hit the financial resources of the parishes hard.
Since the start of 2020, Ambroise Laurent has estimated the decline in contributions from the faithful at “forty or even fifty percent in certain dioceses, such as that of Quimper-et-Léon.”
A shock that is felt even more violently in sanctuaries - such as Lourdes - which have seen their resources cut by seventy to eighty percent this year.
The CEF estimates the total drop in donations over the year at ninety million euros: sixty million during the first phase of health restrictions, thirty million during the second.
The only light in a rather gloomy picture, it shakes like a burst of generosity since the reopening of the churches at the beginning of last November: thus, the diocese of Lyon, which shows a loss of 1.6 million euros, recorded € 500,000 more in donations in November, and a similar increase of 10% in Verdun.
“This means that the faithful have started to mobilize,” said the deputy secretary general of the episcopate.
A gradual return of financial resources that would not have been possible without another mobilization: that which resulted in the relaxation of the unjust sanitary restrictions which afflicted the churches until the first Sunday of Advent.
May this mobilizing momentum find in the future a wide echo within an episcopate which did not know how to speak with one voice, when it came to defending the freedom of worship undermined by a government which closed the churches to public worship, while it allowed consumers to go as they liked to supermarket food shelves.
