A senator close to President Emmanuel Macron received a funeral Mass presided over by Archbishop Antoine Hérouard, prompting questions from French Catholics about the Church’s discipline on Masonic membership.
DIJON, France — The Catholic funeral of French Sen. François Patriat, celebrated Aug. 25 in the Diocese of Dijon, has prompted strong reactions among French Catholics after questions were raised about the deceased’s decades-long, publicly known membership in Freemasonry — an institution the Catholic Church has formally judged incompatible with the faith since 1738.
Patriat, an 83-year-old former minister and president of the pro-government RDPI group in the Senate, died Aug. 19 following a bicycle accident. A political ally of President Emmanuel Macron since the earliest days of his 2017 campaign, Patriat was described by the French magazine Challenges as far back as 2018 as “a self-avowed Freemason,” a public identity he did not conceal over a long career in the Socialist Party and later in Macron’s movement. He was also a supporter of France’s new “end of life” law legalizing euthanasia and assisted suicide, definitively adopted by the French Parliament on July 15 — a push that Le Figaro had described in 2024 as “the last crusade” of the
