Pope Benedict's first official visit to France will unite two men who share few similarities beyond their mutual interest in relaxing this country's profoundly strict tradition of separating church and state.Benedict, who meets President Nicolas Sarkozy shortly after arriving here next Friday, is the head of a church that preaches against abortion, homosexuality, divorce, and extramarital sex to more than one billion members worldwide, including an estimated 13 million Roman Catholics in Canada.
The 81-year-old German Pope will deliver 11 speeches over four days to an estimated half a million people in Paris and Lourdes. He will begin by discussing "the place of religion in France" with Sarkozy, 53, the hyperactive, Ray-Ban-wearing, celebrity-enamoured head of one of the world's most secular countries.
It has been noted here that Sarkozy would be ineligible to receive Holy Communion from the Pope because of his two divorces before his marriage earlier this year to ex-supermodel Carla Bruni, who once said she's "bored with monogamy" and whose list of ex-lovers includes Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton and Donald Trump.
Yet some analysts say Benedict, because he has a crucial ally in Sarkozy, could have a greater impact in France than his far more popular predecessor John Paul II, who made an emotional final visit here the year before his death in 2005.
Sarkozy has been outspoken in trying to ease the strict 1905 secularism law in France, a country known historically as the church's "oldest daughter" because of its deep Christian roots.
That has created an opening for Benedict, a respected intellectual who speaks fluent French, to gently urge greater public involvement among the country's practising Catholics.
"Certainly Sarkozy's private life isn't what the Pope would like to see, but he has shown himself to be much more open to public expressions of faith and especially Christian faith," said David Gibson, a former Vatican correspondent and author of The Coming Catholic Church and The Rule of Benedict.
Some say many French citizens, feeling threatened by the five million-strong Muslim community as well as the growth in the Pentecostal movement, might see some comfort in a higher profile for the Catholic Church.
"The French feel their identity slipping away from them," said John Allen, National Catholic Reporter columnist and Vatican correspondent for CNN.
"I think Benedict sees a moment of opportunity - that people will see the church as a guarantor of French identity rather than as a threat to that identity."
Sarkozy rocked France's political establishment, which recoils at any public discussion of religion, while still a cabinet minister under Jacques Chirac's presidency in 2004.
In his book The Republic, Religions and Hope, Sarkozy described himself at the time as a man of the Catholic faith, culture and tradition, though he wrote that his religious practice was "episodic."
He argued that "spiritual need and hope are not satisfied" by the French Republican ideal that keeps religion far from the public square.
He argued that France should consider amendments to the 1905 law that established secularism and banned state-sanctioned or state-funded religion, in part to help France's Muslim community build mosques and ease their way into the mainstream.
Those were fighting words in a country where presidents have tripped over themselves to avoid any public discussion of religion, which banned Muslim head scarves and other religious symbols from school.
Sarkozy, though he has backed away from seeking changes to the law amid cries of protest from opponents and even some religious groups, continued to push his views during a speech in Rome last December.
He called for "positive secularism" in France and said schoolteachers will never be able to replace priests or pastors in explaining the difference between good and evil.
"A man who believes is a man who hopes, and the interest of the republic is that there be a lot of men and women who hope."
Some critics say Sarkozy is pandering to older French Catholics who haven't taken kindly to his romantic escapades, while others say his real target isn't Catholics but the threat posed by unrest in the suburbs around Paris where Muslims are concentrated.
"The primary concern of Nicolas Sarkozy is Islam," wrote Martin Peltier in his new book Nicolas Sarkozy: The Republic and Religion.
"The only reason for modifying the law of 1905 is to integrate Islam. The State will pay for mosques and the training of imams. The ghettoes will thus be pacified."
The Pope's centrepiece Paris event will be an outdoor mass next Saturday that is expected to draw more than 200,000.
He will then fly to Lourdes, the tiny town of 15,000 residents on the foothills of the Pyrenees mountains near the Spanish border.
There he will commemorate the 150th anniversary of a poor and sickly French peasant girl's Vatican-recognized apparitions of the Virgin Mary.
Six million visitors a year make the pilgrimage to Lourdes, many of them sick or infirm. They head to a spring, with water believed to have special healing powers, where Bernadette Soubirous had 18 "encounters" with the Virgin Mary over a over a five-month period in 1858.
The annual total of visitors to the small town that has roughly 270 hotels is expected to soar to eight million this year, including more than 200,000 during the Pope's visit.+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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(Source: Canada.com)