Béatrice (all those mentioned by first name declined to be fully identified) still remembers the election of Francis in March 2013. Enthused at the time by the figure of Buenos Aires' former archbishop, she found herself even caught up in a "pope frenzy," she recalled with a smile. The young Catholic from Lyon, now in her thirties and a mother, had even "liked" and followed dozens of fan pages relating to the new pontiff on social media.
"We had been waiting for a while and I was happy to have a new pope. I had total confidence in him and the institution," Béatrice said before admitting: "I didn't even imagine it could go wrong." Like many French Catholics who will follow the pope's two-day visit to Marseille remotely from Friday, September 22, Béatrice has an ambiguous relationship with Francis.
This is not, of course, an open rejection. The Argentinian is the head of the Catholic Church, and the faithful vow to him the respect and devotion that go with the office and the moral magisterium it carries. Yet, on closer examination, a kind of distance and frostiness seems to have set in between some French faithful and a pope, many of whom feel he never speaks to them. A pope whose preoccupations they imagine to be far removed from their own, seeing him crisscrossing the planet, visiting the furthest reaches without paying any particular attention to "old Europe," unlike his predecessor, Benedict XVI.
Many of these faithful noticed France was not the primary focus of the papal visit. The pontiff repeatedly insisted he was visiting Marseille, not France. "French Catholics are disappointed because, for Francis, France is not a priority in his pontificate. Moreover, he doesn't seem to know it that well," said Céline Béraud, a religions specialist at the Ecole des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences, EHESS).
The sociology and political orientation of many French Catholics may also have something to do with this alleged distance from a pontiff perceived, in some respects, to be leaning further to the left politically than his predecessors. According to an IFOP poll for the newspaper La Croix conducted the day after the first round of the presidential election in April last year, most Catholics said they had voted for candidates ranging from the center to the far right.
A civil servant and a mother of a large family, Adélaïde, 43, said she did not feel concerned by Pope Francis. A fervent Catholic and "legitimist," she regrets that the head of the Church is sometimes the subject of bitter criticism. But she still thinks that the themes he tackles are not hers. "Questions about migrants or the environment are important, but they speak to me much less than the dogmatic themes addressed by Benedict XVI. Francis doesn't feed me as much [spiritually]," said the woman who grew up with John Paul II, for whom she said she had affection.
You have 58.89% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.