France’s Cheers, Hostility Await Pope

The signals are as diverse as condom water bombs, an alliance of left-wing protesters, a unifying king dead for 15 centuries and a modern bishop stripped of his flock and left to wander the Internet. But the message is the same: France, the “eldest daughter” of the Roman Catholic Church, has lost enthusiasm for its faith. The pope’s passe in France.

Hostility and indifference will echo among the cheers for John Paul II when he arrives in France today on a four-day visit that should test both his stamina and patience.

“An ailing pope is coming to a sick country. It’s hard to know whose illness is greater,” Bruno Frappat, editor of the Catholic daily newspaper La Croix, said in an interview.

The pontiff, 76, who faces surgery next month to remove a chronically troubling appendix, can expect the usual cordial welcome from Catholics today in the western city of Tours.

But countercurrents also abound: In one recent national poll, only 53% had a “good opinion” of the church, down from 79% a decade ago.

On the eve of his visit, John Paul, ever the outspoken advocate for no-compromise morality, is faulted here on questions of history, politics and dogma. “Abort the pope’s visit,” said one opposition banner hung from a church.

Much of the controversy is peculiarly French. But on questions of morality and dogma, France is a microcosm of broad First World disillusionment with a pope whose strict teachings are increasingly challenged, even by practicing Catholics.

Responding this week to the resignation of a 56-year-old bishop in Scotland who seems to have run off with a 40-year-old divorced woman, British Cardinal Basil Hume said the church should relax its 1,000-year insistence on priestly celibacy. “It is not divine law. It is church law, so any pope or General Council could change it,” Hume told British reporters. Hume said he supports celibacy. But he lamented the loss to the church of priests who wish to marry.

In France, where about 45 million people--80% of the population--are Catholic but only 6 million or so regularly practice their faith, a balding, 60-year-old bishop named Jacques Gaillot personifies divisions among Catholics. A liberal who agitates for immigrants, the homeless and the poor, Gaillot for years challenged papal teachings on priestly celibacy, homosexuality and bedroom issues of personal conscience, such as artificial birth control and abortion.

Last year, in a gesture of papal pique, Gaillot was relieved of the working-class diocese of Evreux, northwest of Paris. Since he remains a bishop and should have at least a nominal diocese, the Vatican appointed him to the vacant See of Partenia, an outpost in the North African desert where Catholics last lived a few centuries after Christ. The bishop of Partenia has no cathedral, but he does have a Web Site (https://www.partenia.fr) from which he now entreats, a two-finger typist, thousands of virtual parishioners.

“Reaction in France against the pope is an echo of what is happening elsewhere in Europe. Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, one knew who the enemy was. Now it is no longer clear. The pope must realize that the church cannot communicate simply by speeches dictating behavior. A distance has grown between the church and a changing society,” Gaillot said Wednesday.

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In a hostile warm-up for John Paul’s fifth visit to France, anarchists tossed condoms filled with water into a cathedral in Nantes earlier this month, and erudite terrorists planted a crude bomb meant to be found at a church in Brittany where John Paul will pray. With the dynamite came the legend, in Latin, “In the name of the pope, BOOM!”

Beware of “intolerant idiocies,” Paris Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger cautioned Catholics.

In Tours, in rural Brittany and in Reims, where the papal visit climaxes in controversy on Sunday, local opponents have successfully stopped the expenditure of state money for religious parts of the papal visit. Small demonstrations are expected; an alliance of radical Catholics, socialists, “Greens,” gays and lesbians, feminists and freethinkers will march against the pope in Paris on Sunday.

Gaillot will miss the Paris march; he’s been invited to lunch with the pope in Reims. “I want to show that I remain linked to the other French bishops,” he said.

On the broad political level, the visit has become a left-right donnybrook, largely because of the papal decision to commemorate the baptism in AD 496 of King Clovis in Reims on Sunday. Clovis unified warring tribes under Christianity after the fall of the Roman Empire and is considered by some to be the founder of France. For centuries it was a Catholic nation, nicknamed “the eldest daughter of the church” by a 19th century cardinal.

Now, though, moderate and leftist opponents say the papal honor to Clovis is a flagrant violation of the 1905 constitutional separation of church and state. The furor has forced President Jacques Chirac to abandon plans to attend Sunday’s service, though his wife will go.

Teacher Patrick Gonthier, secretary-general of an opposition group, observed: “This visit mixes religion with politics. Clovis can be one of the historical dates, but it is reducing France to one act of baptism and reducing its history to a single Christian act.”

By contrast, Jean-Marie Le Pen, racist leader of the hard-right National Front, said it is “unpatriotic” to criticize Clovis or John Paul. Le Pen said he’ll go to the Sunday Mass; organizers wish he wouldn’t bother, and vow he won’t get one of the 393 VIP seats.