Since His Holiness isn't on a jaunt to the Center of the World this time, not as much coverage as one might wish.
And of course, some subjects must be worked into any MSM news report dealing with the Pope, no matter how irrelevant to the matters at hand.
From the Times:
PARIS — Starting his first visit to France as pontiff on Friday, Pope Benedict XVI touched on central themes of his papacy — the tensions between faith and reason, church and state — and urged an increasingly irreligious Europe to look back to its intellectual roots in Christian monastic culture.
“What gave Europe’s culture its foundation — the search for God and the readiness to listen to him — remains today the basis of any genuine culture,” the pope said.
Benedict XVI spoke before 700 academics, cultural figures and the Muslim leaders at the Collège des Bernardins, a new cultural center in a 13th-century monastery, a location he called “emblematic” for his remarks.
“Amid the great cultural upheaval resulting from migrations of peoples and the emerging new political configurations, the monasteries were the places where the treasures of ancient culture survived,” he said.
He continued: “It is through the search for God that the secular sciences take on their importance.”
His message sought to counter a deep vein of anti-clericalism in France, which has long drawn sharp distinctions between issues of faith and matters of temporal power.
“At this moment in history, when cultures continue to cross paths more frequently, I am firmly convinced that a new reflection on the true meaning and importance of secularism is now necessary,” the pope said earlier at a ceremony with President Nicolas Sarkozy at the Élysée Palace, the seat of the French presidency. He used the term in French “laïcité” which denotes the separation of church and state.
But, in contrast with history’s long chronicles of confrontation between the poles of divine and earthly power, the pope proposed a “distinction between the political realm and that of religion in order to preserve both the religious freedom of citizens and the responsibility of the state toward them.”
The pope distinguished between the state’s legislative and social responsibilities and religion’s role “for the formation of conscience” and the “creation of a basic ethical consensus in society.”
The pope’s four-day stay in France had been planned to mark the 150th anniversary of what the Vatican recognizes as the apparitions of the Virgin Mary to a 14-year-old peasant girl, Bernadette Soubirous, in 1858. But he broadened his journey at the invitation of Mr. Sarkozy, who spoke during a visit to Rome and the Vatican last year of a “positive secularism,” saying religion “should not be considered a danger but an asset.”
Roman Catholics make up about 60 percent of its population of 65 million. But only 11 percent of the population regard religion as “‘very important,” according to a survey by the Pew Research Center. France also has a growing Muslim minority of six million and smaller groups of other faiths.
Mr. Sarkozy, flanked by his wife, Carla, met the pope when his plane landed at Orly Airport near Paris. The visit to France is his 10th foreign trip since he became Pope in 2005.
In an interview in fluent French with reporters traveling with him on an Alitalia airplane from Rome, the pope was asked what his message was and replied that it “seemed evident to me that secularism in itself is not in contradiction with faith.”
Religion and politics, he said, “should be open to each other.”
The pope’s visit to France came almost exactly two years after [the MSM ignited a firestorm by quoting out of context and harping, obsessing on the potential to offend violent fringe elements,], in his native Germany, quoting [without endorsing someone dead some 6 centuries, describing someone else even longer gone.]
[A member of the group the MSM hoped to provoke into re-opening the controversy the MSM themselves had instigated refused to be suckered in, and ] described that controversy as “ancient history,” The Associated Press reported. “Through his speeches we know that he is a man of peace and dialogue,” Mr. Boubakeur said.
Speaking before the pope at the Élysée palace, Mr. Sarkozy renewed his appeal for a “positive secularism” saying it was “legitimate for democracy and respectful of secularism to have a dialogue with religions.”
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