The French Government has announced that it is to set to monitor ultra-traditionalist Catholic groups, as well as other 
religious organisations, for signs of “religious pathology”, Reuters reports.
Socialist Interior Minister Manuel Valls said that a shooting spree last year by a French Islamist, in which three soldiers and four Jews were murdered showed that religiously radicalised people could turn quickly to violence.
He was speaking at a conference on the official policy of secularism.
His speech came two days after Socialist President Francois Hollande announced the creation of an “Observatory of Secularism” designed to track how the separation of Church and State is being upheld in France.
Mr Valls and two other cabinet ministers told the conference that the Socialist-led government would stress the secularist policy called “laicite” that they claimed had been weakened under the previous government of President Nicolas Sarkozy.
He said that the aim of the Observatory would be “to detect and understand when an opinion turns into a potentially violent and criminal excess,” he said.
“The objective is to identify when it’s suitable to intervene to treat what has become a religious pathology,” said Valls, whose ministry oversees relations with religions.
France’s official secularism sidelines faith in the public sphere, but a trend towards a more visible religious identity among some Muslims, Jews and Catholics has made defending it a cause for the secularist left-wing parties.
Valls stressed the focus would be not only on radical Salafi Muslims recruiting among disaffected youths, but also on groups such as Civitas, a lay traditionalist Catholic movement that protests aggressively against insults to Christianity.
Police were already observing Civitas closely because its protest campaigns skirt “the limits of legality,” he said. “All excesses are being minutely registered in case we have to consider dissolving it and defending this before a judge.”
According to Reuters, the French Catholic Church has kept its distance from Civitas, which is close to the traditionalist Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX), and encouraged its members to join only Church-backed protests against the planned legalisation of same-sex marriage.
At a Civitas march against gay marriage in Paris last month, some demonstrators attacked a French feminist journalist and several Ukrainian feminists who came dressed as nuns or bared their breasts to mock the ultra-traditionalists.
Mr Valls said the government had a duty to combat religious extremism because it was “an offence to the republic”.
Giving examples of religious extremists, he mentioned creationists in the United States and the Muslim world, radical Islamists, ultra-traditionalist Catholics and ultra-Orthodox Jews who want to live separately from the modern world.
Salafi Muslims, whose stern version of Islam also sets followers apart from Western society, sometimes act in a sectarian way to control youths seeking an identity, he said.
France actively pursues and sometimes bans sects and cults considered a threat to public order but radical Islamist groups have mostly been treated as security problems. Classifying them as sectarian could lead to preemptive legal action against them.
Announcing his initiative on secularism, Hollande said the new observatory – a public agency to monitor policy issues and propose solutions – would also study ways to introduce classes on secular morality in state schools.
Education Minister Vincent Peillon told the conference the classes would stress the French values of equality and fraternity that teachers say pupils – especially in poorer areas with immigrant populations – increasingly do not respect.
“We have to teach this and it’s not being done,” he said. “If we don’t teach it, they won’t learn it.”
Valls urged the more militant secularists at the conference not to see religions as sects to be opposed and to understand that established religions could help fight against extremists.
“We have to say that religions are not sects, otherwise sects are religions,” he said.
Meanwhile, France’s socialist education minister has also been under fire for his promotion of “secularist morality” classes for the nation’s schools, which have been compared to brainwashing classes instituted by Vichy France’s pro-Nazi leader Philippe Petain during World War II. The proposed “Observatory of Secularism” would also be used to institute such classes, according to government officials.
“Secularism is not about simple tolerance. It’s not about ‘anything goes.’ It is a set of values that we have to share,” Minister of Education Vincent Peillon told the French press recently. “To be shared, these values need to be taught and learned and we need to rebuild them among France’s children.”
Pellion’s immediate predecessor in the Ministry of Education, Luc Chatel, called Peillon’s words “frightening,” claiming that his call for the “intellectual and moral reeducation” of French children was a “word for word the call of Marshal Petain on June 25, 1940.”