Pope rejects Macron offer to lead mass at restored Notre Dame

Pope Francis has angered French Catholics by snubbing an invitation to lead the first mass at the restored Notre Dame Cathedral.

Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral alight on April 15, 2019. Picture: AFP

Pope Francis has angered French Catholics by snubbing an invitation to lead the first mass at the restored Notre Dame Cathedral, prompting some to claim that he dislikes the country.

President Emmanuel Macron had been counting on the Pope’s attendance at the December 8 ceremony to mark the rebirth of the cathedral five years after it was severely damaged by fire.

On Friday, however, Mr Macron said that the leader of the Catholic church had confirmed he would not be coming. “I will not go to Paris,” the pontiff said emphatically, without explaining.

Francis’s decision has been seen as proof of his dislike of France, which traditionally prides itself on being the “eldest daughter of the church” because of a fifth-century king’s early conversion to Christianity. “It seems increasingly obvious that Pope Francis is giving the cold shoulder to France,” Le Figaro said.

“Le Pape n’aime pas la France” has trended on social media with comments showing disappointment and hostility towards the pontiff. “He won’t come until they turn Notre Dame into a non-governmental organisation,” said one riposte, alluding to Francis’s focus on pastoral work in the developing world.

Eric Zemmour, the anti-Islam commentator who ran for the presidency in 2022, said the Pope had written off France and the Continent because “in his view, Europe is renouncing Christianity, so Europe is going to die”.

Church members are dismayed that the Pope, 87, has made no formal trip to France since his appointment in 2013, although he has visited for two events – to EU institutions in Strasbourg in 2014 and for a Mediterranean celebration in Marseilles last year. “I’ll go to Marseilles but not to France,” he said then.

Instead, he has tended to give priority to countries in Asia and Africa as well as those at war.

Some French commentators contested the claims that Francis dislikes the country.

Laurent Landete, director of the College des Bernardins, a cultural centre on the Paris Left Bank, told a news site that the Pope saw France as a pillar of the church not requiring his full-time attention. “He sees in France a sort of solidness,” Landete said.

Others say the Vatican has grown weary of the supposed dysfunction in the French church, with infighting between progressives and the tradis, adherents of strict doctrines who have enjoyed a surge in popularity among the young.

The Holy See is also understood to be unhappy with trends in French society such as gay marriage. After the opening ceremony for the Paris Olympics in July, the Vatican said it was saddened by scenes that satirised Christian rites.

There has also been a torrent of revelations of historical abuse by French churchmen and lay activists. In the most recent it emerged that the Vatican had known for years that Abbe Pierre, the founder of the charity Emmaus who died in 2007 aged 94, had for decades been accused of sexually assaulting women.

The Pope called Pierre a “terrible sinner’ and said he had behaved “diabolically”, but that his “shameful crimes” were part of the human condition.

The Conference of Bishops of France said it would open its archives on Pierre, a wartime resistance fighter and MP, without waiting the statutory 75 years. The archives showed that the churchman, once voted third-greatest French person of all time, had been accused of sexual abuses and sent for treatment in the 1950s.

THE TIMES