September 3, 2008

Pastoral challenge: Encouraging French Catholics to make room for God

VATICAN CITY (CNS)—Pope Benedict XVI is traveling to France in mid-September, making a four-day visit that is loaded with events and charged with pastoral challenges. The Sept. 12-15 trip was designed primarily to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Marian apparitions in Lourdes, one of the world’s most popular pilgrimage sites. For the 81-year-old pope, it will be a trip to the heart of an increasingly de-Christianized Europe, an area where, as he once put it, the “great churches seem to be dying.” The pope wants to encourage a revival, and his schedule offers him several possibilities. In meetings with civil and cultural leaders on the trip’s first day, he is likely to defend the legitimate voice of religion in today’s secularized European culture. By personally commemorating the anniversary of the Lourdes apparitions, the pope will have an opportunity to evoke the long tradition of Marian devotion in France and explain its relevance today. The papal events in Lourdes, a place where millions of sick pilgrims go to pray every year, will highlight the Church’s solidarity with the suffering. And his three meetings with French bishops—two regional encounters behind closed doors and one national meeting with a public speech—present occasions for a frank assessment of pastoral problems and strategies.