Reporting of F.F.
The bulldozer goes into action, it moves inexorably and hits the wall of the world with the hardness of steel church of St Lambert, small Catholic temple in the town of Immerath in North Rhine-Westphalia.In two days, the church was transformed into a pile of rubble. In its place nothing but an empty space, which will be used to expand the nearby Garzweiler coal mine. Some say it will be used for a new depot, others to widen the access routes. And this is the reason for the demolition, already decided by 2013, when the federal court decided that the reasons of the local population, of ecologists and those who fought to keep an old church standing (deconsecrated but in the hearts of the local faithful), were less important than the public interest in increasing the extraction capacity of that coal mine. Today, that church built by the local Catholic community in 1893 it no longer exists.
And with it, it must be said, a little piece of Europe is also leaving which is slowly becoming part of giving in to the impetus of modernity, of production, of the frenetic pace of the market. A Europe that prefers to expand a coal deposit rather than maintain a structure that, after more than a century, it remained there, to remember that a religious tradition, but first and foremost cultural, existed and should continue to exist.

Unfortunately this is not the first case of old churches deconsecrated and demolished due to the laws of the market. And in this, it is the Church, the one with a capital “c”., to be in some way complicit. If you make temples places subject to the coldest laws of the market, it is clear that it is a small village church, less and less frequented and with few priests available, it becomes a cost and not a resource. But a temple can, of any faith, as well as a civil monument, become a market object and transform into a mere question of convenience? To this question, Unfortunately, Europe is already responding positively. France is unfortunately at the forefront in this. Despite the presence of Christianity for about 1500 years, many churches, especially the smaller and more peripheral ones, they are left to neglect and abandonment.
The faithful are missing, the parish priests, the money, and then it is the curia itself that sells them to private individuals, who decide to demolish them to build something more fruitful such as a car park, a shopping center, a cinema, or they convert them into gyms, offices, hotels. And if it's not the curia that takes care of it, they are the mayors, than for cash or ideological reasons, they prefer to demolish the cultural and historical heritage of their city rather than keep it standing as the last symbol of a greater tradition. In the 2016 the case of the church of Santa Rita was emblematic, in Paris, demolished for a parking lot. The protests of the faithful barricaded inside the church were to no avail: it was the police themselves who evicted it and dragged the parish priest away to allow its destruction. Seven churches were demolished in 2016 in France. As Giulio Meotti wrote for The Sheet: "It goes from the chapel of Saint Bernard in Clairmarais to the church of Ferrandière in Villeurbanne. Together with those destroyed, In the 2016 the French state, which manages part of the places of worship since 1905, he deconsecrated and put others up for sale 26 Christian places of worship".
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