Bucking French Tradition, City Sets Up a Kind of Holy Quarter

THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Scott Sayre

A woman prayed at the Fo Guang Shan temple in the new city Bussy-Saint-Georges, France.

FRANCE --- Set above a sweep of green farmland, the crumbling stone chapel at the center of this village met the spiritual requirements of its Roman Catholic residents for nearly four centuries. But Bussy Saint-Georges is no longer just a village. It is now a “new city” of 25,000, a planned development of hundreds of cream-colored apartment complexes, tile-roofed houses, schools, banks, shops and parks, linked to nearby Paris with a highway and a regional train. And so at the edge of town, an “Esplanade of the Religions” is under construction, a sort of holy quarter in the fields that includes a mosque, a synagogue, a Laotian Buddhist pagoda and a $20 million Taiwanese Buddhist temple, said to be Europe’s largest. [link]