Pope Avoids Controversy On Arrival French Visit Has Stirred Old Passions About Role Of Church
Arriving here on a trip that has stirred old passions about the role of the Roman Catholic Church in French society, Pope John Paul II tried to dampen the debate on Thursday with an appeal to compassion and tolerance “regardless of religious beliefs.”
On his fifth visit to France, the 76-year-old pope avoided earlier references to France as the “eldest daughter of the church,” a phrase that had become a lightning rod in the controversy over the pope’s scheduled attendance at this Sunday’s celebration of the 1,500th anniversary of the baptism of the Frankish king Clovis at the Cathedral in Rheims.
President Jacques Chirac, who helped refuel the centuries-old debate over the separation of church and state when he used the phrase during a visit to the Vatican earlier this year, also took care on Thursday to welcome the pope in the name of a “republican and secular France.”
In their public remarks after a private 20-minute meeting here in Tours, both men countered the argument that the Frankish king’s conversion to Christianity somehow amounted to the founding of the French nation.
“It is to the credit of France that it is rising above varying opinions and remembering that the baptism of Clovis is part of the events that brought it into being,” the pope said.
But the debate over the pope’s trip went far beyond the arcane historical issue of Clovis to a vehement argument over the place of the Roman Catholic Church in France today.
It is an argument with old roots, dating back to the French Revolution and even further to the Great Schism of the 14th and 15th centuries, when rival popes sat in Rome and Avignon.
Some of the fire has been directed against the pope himself, whose strict and unbending views on issues ranging from celibacy for priests to birth control have earned him the wrath of the liberal wing of the French church. Opposition to his policies in France - a country with 47 million Catholics, the sixth largest Catholic population in the world - peaked last year when the Vatican removed a left-wing cleric, Bishop Jacques Gaillot, from his diocese in Evreux and assigned him a parish with no parishioners in the desert of North Africa.
“The Cumbersome Visitor” was the headline on Thursday in the leftist Paris daily Liberation, which went on to describe the pope’s visit as an “embarrassment” for French bishops and “a bother” for the government.
In a recent front-page article, the weekly magazine L’Express asked whether Pope John Paul II, visibly ailing and scheduled for surgery to remove what his doctors say is an inflamed appendix, should abdicate.
Top French Catholics have gone on a counterattack, particularly against those dissident Catholics who are challenging the pope’s leadership of the church.
“I have the impression of an emerging climate of intolerance, and at times of hatred toward the pope,” Cardinal Paul Poupard, president of the Vatican’s cultural council, said recently.
“But one cannot be inside the church and say that one is not in agreement with the pope.”
Poupard attributed the depth of feeling against Pope John Paul to his unwavering adherence to doctrine and principle.