Pope Benedict XVI visits France this week in a bid to push back anticlericalism and revive Catholicism in one of the world's most secular countries.The four-day tour, starting on Friday, will be crowned by a papal Mass at Lourdes to mark the 150th anniversary of the apparition of the Virgin Mary to a 14-year-old miller's daughter, Bernadette Sourbirous.
The visit comes in a context of mounting concern in the Vatican about falling numbers of faithful in a country that once was a Catholic bastion - a decline the conservative pontiff clearly links to France's hard-edged secularism.
On Friday, the 81-year-old Pope is scheduled to make a speech in Paris to guests from France's cultural scene, when he is expected to pound out the message that loss of faith leads to national regression.
"There's no doubt about it, this speech is going to be a big moment," said a source in the French Catholic Church.
The speech will be about "restoring trust in human reason when it opens to the transcendental", but the sub-text is about papal concern about secularist extremism, the source said.
France believes strongly in having a public arena where worship and religious symbols are banned. Politicians may be devout Catholics in private, but are careful never to make references to their faith in public.
In the face of a perceived rise in Islamism, the state has acted firmly to defend secularist principles, banning notably the wearing of crucifixes and Muslim headscarves in state schools.
In the latest controversy, a public prosecutor in the city of Rennes has been blasted for postponing a criminal case after one of the defendants, accused of armed robbery, said he observed the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which entails daytime fasting, and thus would be too weak to stand trial.
Defenders of France's secularism say it is essential to have a space open to all that is free of the toxicity of religious extremism and rivalry.
Critics say it panders to anti-clericalism, which emerged among French intellectuals and leftwingers in the 19th century and persists to this day, sometimes to the point of intolerance.
As guardian of the Catholic doctrine under his predecessor John Paul II, the Pope, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, has long had France in his sights. In a speech in 1992, he warned the country of the danger of ignoring its Christian roots.
"For a culture and a nation to cut itself from the religious and ethical forces of its history is tantamount to suicide," the future Pope said.
Friday's speech to the artistic elite comes exactly two years after a landmark speech in Regensburg, in the Pope's native Bavaria, that slammed contemporary Western culture for its focus on "positivistic reason" and the shunning of God.
The other big goal of the papal visit will be to rally the faithful at a time when the numbers of French churchgoers and men entering the priesthood are hitting record lows.
The shortage of clerics has become so acute that France has had to import them temporarily from Poland, rather as it has been doing with its plumbers.
Rural areas, once the backbone of the church, have been hit hardest. Thousands of villages, already badly hit by the exodus to the towns, no longer have the resident priest who was one of the big figures of local life, overseeing Mass in a full church.
Instead, a rural priest must tend to as many as a dozen or 14 villages, scheduling a Mass in each one every two months or longer, in churches that are usually three-quarters empty.
To fill the gaps, some dioceses have set up a training programme by which devout lay members of the community take on some of the duties traditionally assumed by priests.
At the Venaco diocese in Corsica, for instance, lay women will be in charge of administering funerals.
"We are moving away from an ecclesiastical structure that belongs to the 19th century and it won't be done without pain," the head of the Catholic Church in France, Cardinal Andre Vingt-Trois, told Le Figaro newspaper last week. He insisted, though: "The Church in France isn't dead, it is going through a transition."
Other figures attest that parts of the Catholic faith are flourishing, especially among young urban people, drawn to evangelising meetings that include prayers and Bible reading.
A Christian rock festival is held in Chartres and a Festival of Charity in Paris, and the Church mounted a successful challenge to Halloween (darkly viewed as a heathen import) with a youth movement called Holywins.
Among adults, monasteries are staging a comeback, offering a retreat for reflection, and the 1000-year-old pilgrimage across the Pyrenees to Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain, where St James is buried, has become hugely popular.
But one of the Pope's tasks will be to balance this spiritual resurgence among the liberal young and the rise of fringe Catholic groups with the Church's traditionalist wing, with which he has an instinctive sympathy.
MATTER OF FAITH
* 65 per cent of French people are baptised Catholics, compared with 80 per cent in 1960.
* Only 4.5 per cent of the population go regularly to church, compared with one in five in 1960.
* In 1996, there were 28,000 priests in France; today, they number only 20,000.
* Last year, just 101 priests were ordained in French, compared with 595 in 1960.
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(Source: nzherald.co.nz)