c. 2008 Religion News Service

VATICAN CITY _ During a four-day visit to France beginning on Friday (Sept. 12), Pope Benedict XVI will make a pilgrimage to one of Catholicism’s most popular shrines, Lourdes, which celebrates its 150th anniversary this year.

At the same time, the pope will make a kind of missionary excursion to the heartland of post-Christian Europe: a country where only 40 percent of baptized Catholics identify themselves as church members, and where only 10 percent regularly attend Mass.

Reviving Europe’s Christian roots is one of the signature projects of Benedict’s papacy, and he has found an unlikely and outspoken ally in France’s colorful president, Nicolas Sarkozy.

The original reason for Benedict’s trip _ his 10th outside Italy since he became pope _ was to visit the town in southwestern France where Catholics believe that the Virgin Mary appeared to Bernadette Soubirous in 1858.

Bernadette’s visions included the revelation of a healing spring, which every year draws more than 6 million pilgrims to Lourdes, many of them ailing and seeking a miraculous cure. The Vatican has certified 66 such cures, a small fraction of the reported total.

Lourdes is just one chapter in France’s rich Christian history, which dates back to the baptism of King Clovis in 496 A.D., and has earned the country the title of “eldest daughter of the church.”

But France is today one of Europe’s most secular nations, where only 11 percent of the population consider religion “very important,” according to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center.

“The level of religious practice is very low and the shortage of priests is dramatic,” French Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran told an Italian newspaper this week.

Though secularization has been the trend across Europe for years, France has a particularly strong legacy of anticlericalism, including its 18th-century Enlightenment and Revolution, and a 1905 law which expropriated church goods and banned state support or recognition of religion.

Benedict, who has praised the United States as an “example of healthy secularism where the religious dimension … is not only tolerated but appreciated as the Nation’s `soul,”’ is expected to tout his vision of “positive secularity” while in France.

According to his spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, Benedict will most likely raise the subject on Friday in a speech at the Elysee Palace, residence of the French president.

It was Sarkozy who invited the pope to expand his Lourdes visit to take in Paris, where Benedict will offer Mass on Saturday before a predicted crowd of 200,000 at the Esplanade des Invalides.

Sarkozy has long been an outspoken critic of French secularism, calling for state support of religion (including that of the country’s more than 6 million Muslims). In a speech at Rome’s Basilica of St. John Lateran last December, he declared that the “roots of France are essentially Christian. I fully embrace France’s past and that special link that has long united our nation to the Church.”

The champion of traditional Catholicism may seem an odd role for the twice-divorced Sarkozy, whose third wife is the Italian supermodel Carla Bruni; but he also embraces the role of maverick in other ways, including a pro-American posture unusual in Western Europe.

As a result, Sarkozy’s decision to meet Benedict’s plane on the tarmac, instead of waiting for him at the presidential palace as dictated by protocol, is apt to remind critics of George W. Bush, who made the same gesture when the pope visited the U.S. last April.

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