French schools ban Christmas film 'The Star' for being 'too Christian'

A school in the French city of Langon had reportedly suspended the showing of the Christmas film "The Star" because it was deemed not secular enough.

According to European Post, 83 students of a French school had already started watching "The Star," an animated adventure comedy about the birth of Jesus.

However, when teachers noticed that the subject was the nativity of Jesus Christ, they immediately suspended the showing of the film. All the students were reportedly told to go back to school without seeing the end of the movie.

Several controversies over nativity scenes and other religious symbols have erupted in France in the past.

Last month, a French court ordered Béziers Mayor Robert Ménard to permanently take down a nativity scene from the city hall, but he vowed to let the display stand.

Ménard put up the display in 2014 shortly after he was elected mayor of the city, but complaints were lodged against the religious scene, with some claiming that it violated the country's strict secularization laws.

Despite the court case, Ménard went on to install a nativity scene at the city hall in 2015 and 2016. In an apparent attempt to get around the ban, the mayor said that he will put up the display this year with new scenes that will reflect local regional customs.

The ruling from 2016 had stated that nativity scenes were allowed in public buildings if "special circumstances show that the installation is of a cultural, artistic or festive nature." Since 2015, the nativity display has been accompanied by a large Christmas tree and a letterbox that allows children to send letters to Father Christmas.

"I am respectful of secularism, but an open, tolerant secularism that does not consist in chasing down what we are and denying our history," Ménard stated in a column for his former magazine Boulevard Voltaire.

In late October, a French court had ordered the removal of a cross from a memorial of St. John Paul II, citing a 1905 law that prohibits religious monuments or symbols in any public place that is not a museum, cemetery, or place of worship.

The ruling was criticized by Polish Prime Minister Beata Szydło who suggested that the order to remove the cross was a kind of anti-European totalitarianism.

"John Paul II said that history teaches that democracy without freedom transforms into open or disguised totalitarianism," she told the Polish Press Agency. "Our great Pole, our great European, is a symbol of a Christian, united Europe. The dictate of political correctness — the secular state — introduces a place for values that are alien to our culture, (and) which lead to terrorism to the daily life of Europeans," she added.

Szydło offered to take the monument to Poland to save it from "censorship" with the permission of French authorities and the local community.