July 1889" contingent upon their receiving ministerial employment. Article 40 disqualified religious ministers from election to municipal offices for eight years following ratification of the Act. Article 41 distributed money previously budgeted for supporting churches to municipalities. (Repealed) Article 42 retained legal holidays. (Repealed) Article 43 (amended in 2007) set a deadline of three months by which measures for implementation will be determined. Article 44 specified previous laws that were to remain in force along with the Act. Effects The 1905 law put an end to the government funding of religious groups by France and its political subdivisions. (The state had previously agreed to such funding in the Napoleonic Concordat of 1801 as compensation for the Revolution's confiscation of Church properties.) At the same time, it declared that all religious buildings were property of the state and local governments and made available for free to the church. Other articles of the law included the prohibition of affixing religious signs on public buildings, and laying down that the Republic no longer names French archbishops or bishops. Alsace-Lorraine is still governed by the 1801 Concordat which recognises four religions, but not secularism. When the 1905 legislation superseded the Concordat elsewhere in France, Alsace-Lorraine was part of the German Empire; thus, the 1905 law has never applied there. Similarly, the law has never been applied in the overseas Department of French Guiana as it was a colony in 1905. Reactions by the Catholic Church Pope Pius X condemned the law in the February 1906 encyclical Vehementer Nos as a unilateral break of the 1801 Concordat; it later condemned it again in his August 1906 encyclical Gravissimo officii munere, declaring it a "nefarious law" and calling French Catholics to "defend the religion of your Fatherland". In 1908, the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Penitentiary ruled that all Deputies and Senators who had voted in favour of the law were latae sententiae excommunicated. Although the 1905 French law on the Separation of the Churches and the State initially was a particularly "painful and traumatic event" for the Catholic Church in France, the French government began making serious strides towards reconciliation with the Catholic Church later during the 1920s by both recognizing the social impact of organized religion in France and amending the law itself through new legislation and rendering court decisions that were favorable to organized religion in France. In 1921 the Catholic Church and