The minaret of the new Grand Mosque of Marseille, whose cornerstone will be laid here in April, will be silent ”” no muezzin, live or recorded, will disturb the neighborhood with the call to prayer. Instead, the minaret will flash a beam of light for a couple of minutes, five times a day.

Normally, the light would be green, for the color of Islam. But Marseille is a port, and green is reserved for signals to ships at sea. Red? No, the firefighters have reserved red.

Instead, said Noureddine Cheikh, the head of the Marseille Mosque Association, the light will almost surely be purple ”” a rather nightclubby look for such an elegant building.

So is this assimilation? Mr. Cheikh laughs. “I suppose it is,” he said. “It’s a good symbol of assimilation.”

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As someone with two daughters this is a concern; I also think it would make for interesting viewing and discussion in the context of youth ministry–KSH.

For the second time this month, the Church of Scientology has won a battle against its dissolution in Europe, despite a stiff sentence handed down by a French court against its operations here.

In a verdict delivered Tuesday (Oct. 27), a Paris court fined the church’s Celebrity Center and its bookshop in the French capital nearly $900,000 for defrauding former members. It handed suspended prison sentences to four church leaders and fined two others.

But the court stopped short of banning the church’s operations in France, as demanded by the prosecution. A recent legal change bars courts here from dissolving organizations convicted of fraud.

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[ELEANOR] BEARDSLEY: The affair died down again until this week, when on a late-night political talk show Marine Le Pen, daughter of far-right Nationalist Party leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, dug out a copy of Mitterrand’s 2005 autobiographical novel and read excerpts set in the brothels of Bangkok….

Ms. LE PEN: …Mr. Frederic Mitterrand, culture minister, describes his pleasure in sexual tourism, all the while knowing the perversity of the system. It’s in black and white right here, and this man’s a minister.

BEARDSLEY: Soon, everyone was reading the same excerpts online, although no one had bothered to notice them in his book for the last five years.

Le Pen called for Mitterrand to resign, and in a bizarre political matchup, members of Mitterrand’s Socialist Party joined the far right in attacking him, and no one missed the ironic connection between l’affaire Mitterrand and l’affaire Polanski.

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After Paris warned that new sanctions against Teheran remained an option despite the likelihood of negotiations with Iran, French President Nicolas Sarkozy maintained that the Islamic republic was still working on a nuclear weapons program.

“It is a certainty to all of our secret services. Iran is working today on a nuclear [weapons] program,” Sarkozy told lawmakers from his UMP party on Tuesday, according to Press TV.

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It is a measure of France’s confusion about Islam and its own Muslim citizens that in the political furor here over “banning the burqa,” as the argument goes, the garment at issue is not really the burqa at all, but the niqab.

Two veiled Muslim women carrying the French flag during a march against Islamophobia and in favour of the veil in schools, in Paris in 2004.

A burqa is the all-enveloping cloak, often blue, with a woven grill over the eyes, that many Afghan women wear, and it is almost never seen in France. The niqab, often black, leaves the eyes uncovered.

Still, a movement against it that started with a Communist mayor near Lyon has gotten traction within France’s ruling center-right party, which claims to be defending French values, and among many on the left, who say they are defending women’s rights. A parliamentary commission will soon meet to investigate whether to ban the burqa — in other words, any cloak that covers most of the face.

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“America is six months behind; it has wasted a lot of time,” said Patrick Devedjian, the minister in charge of the French relance, or stimulus. By the time Washington gets around to doling out most of its money, Mr. Devedjian sniffed, “the crisis could be over.”

Gallic pride aside, Mr. Devedjian has a point. While he plans to spend 75 percent of France’s stimulus money this year, the White House is giving itself until fall 2010 to lay out that big a share of the American expenditure. And many experts predict that Washington will fall short of that goal.

As it turns out, France’s more centralized, state-directed economy ”” so often criticized in good times for smothering entrepreneurship and holding back growth ”” is proving remarkably effective at deploying funds quickly and efficiently in bad times.

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Let me tell you a little about our Anglican Church here in France. I should begin by saying that it is a privilege to have such a Church, as of course France is a Roman Catholic country and does not need to permit other religions to have a base here. However, the Anglican Church has good relationships with the Catholic church, and we are always aware of our standing in the country.

Our church comes under the Diocese of Europe, overseen by the Bishop of Gibraltar, as do all other Anglican churches in Europe.

Ten years ago an English vicar and his wife felt called to come to Brittany to start a centre for worship. All the legalities complied with , they opened their own home, with a group of half a dozen people , for Sunday worship. Contacts were made during the next year with a Catholic teaching monastery , who kindly offered a set of rooms to be used on a Sunday. Set in their beautiful gardens, it was a wonderful place to worship at the weekly services….

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The task of forming priests is a delicate mission. The formation offered by the Seminary is demanding, because a portion of the People of God will be entrusted to the pastoral solicitude of the future priests, the People that Christ saved and for whom he gave his life.
It is right for seminarians to remember that if the Church demands much of them it is because they are to care for those whom Christ ransomed at such a high price.

Many qualities are required of future priests: human maturity, spiritual qualities, apostolic zeal, intellectual rigour…. To achieve these virtues, candidates to the priesthood must not only be able to witness to them to their formation teachers but even more, they must be the first to benefit from these same qualities lived and shared by those who are in charge of helping them to attain maturity.

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In a groundbreaking case, a Paris court will decide for the first time whether to dissolve the Church of Scientology in France, which is facing charges of organized fraud.

The demand was made by French prosecutors on Monday (June 15) as they wrapped up their case against the church’s Paris headquarters and bookshop. If found guilty, the institutions may also face a nearly $6 million fine.

Six members of the church are also on trial, and may also face heavy fines along with prison sentences if convicted.

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“If they hadn’t come, where would we be today?’ said [Louis] Delevin, 77, who as a farm boy of 12 provided the pilots with apple cider between raids on the retreating German troops. “You don’t have to be a great scholar to understand that the freedom we enjoy today was decided in those days in 1944.”

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Their stories kept him awake through much of the night. The expectant father in his 20s who was to be a witness at his brother’s wedding Saturday. The disbelieving teens who had come to Charles de Gaulle airport expecting to greet family members arriving from Brazil. The woman in her 60s who grabbed his hands, begging him to say there was still hope of finding her child.

“I had to tell them the truth, that in my opinion there was no hope,” said Guillaume Denoix de Saint Marc, weariness evident in his voice.

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When a young Jew named Ilan Halimi was found dying on a railway siding three years ago, duct tape over his eyes and his body burned and slashed, the French police were reluctant at first to call it a hate crime.

Within a week, their caution gave way to a different and uglier conclusion, one that sent shock waves through a country that has wrestled with the demons of anti-Semitism for years.

The victim was targeted, investigators said, because he was Jewish.

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But despite calls for unity from Mr. Obama and the British prime minister, Gordon Brown ”” the host of the Group of 20 meeting that formally begins Thursday ”” the French and German leaders held a joint, and combative, news conference to underscore their differences with the Anglo-American approach to the crisis.

While President Nichoals Sarkozy of France did not repeat an earlier threat to walk out of the conference ”” “I just got here,” he joked ”” he made it clear he would reject an agreement that puts off stringent new regulations on banks, tax havens, and hedge funds.

“The decisions need to be taken now, today and tomorrow,” Mr. Sarkozy said. “This has nothing to do with ego. This has nothing to do with temper tantrums. When it comes to historic moments, you can’t circumvent them.”

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As many as three million people took to the streets across France today to protest against President Nicolas Sarkozy’s handling of the economic crisis and demand more help for struggling workers.

The protests, which polls show are backed by three quarters of the French public, reflect growing disillusion with Sarkozy’s pledges of reform as the crisis has thrown tens of thousands out of work and left millions more worried about their jobs.

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“Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself on this earth.”

–Jean Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

A nationwide strike Thursday by French public and private sector workers fearful about the global economic crisis shut down rail and subway lines, choked public services and left millions of schoolchildren without their teachers across the country.

In Paris, commuters braved freezing temperatures and biked, walked and even took boats to work. But a 2007 law ensuring minimal transport service meant that some subways, buses and suburban rail lines were operating ”” and they were stuffed full of passengers.

Railway workers led the walkout that the French already are calling “Black Thursday.” Commuters, however, appeared resigned to the year’s first big strike.

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I’m convinced that the world needs an independent, united, imaginative and strong Europe, which is the friend of the whole world in the sense of being ready to talk to the whole world. A Europe which, I hope, will at last give itself the institutions it needs: a president elected for two and a half years. This depends on our Irish friends. I want to pay tribute to the courage of Prime Minister Brian Cowen, who has announced a referendum for 2009. We will support them. Ireland has to understand that Europe needs her and that she needs Europe. This will enable us to have a Europe which can speak with one voice ”“ as it has to in the gas crisis where I would call on everyone to have a modicum of common sense.

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The head of Europe’s biggest economy said Thursday that world leaders should be looking at the massive U.S. deficit and other economic imbalances, not just problems caused by financial markets, as they debate a new global order.

Speaking at a conference in Paris on the future of capitalism, German Chancellor Angela Merkel singled out the American budget deficit and China’s current account surplus ”” the difference between exports and imports ”” as problems upsetting the global economy.

“We would be making an error if we were content to look solely at financial markets,” she said.

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“When you hear this message, I will no longer be there,” the voice, characteristically spirited, confident, just a little bit cheeky and familiar to all of France, said on a tape released this week.

The words were those of Sister Emmanuelle, a nun revered for her work with the disenfranchised, especially among the garbage-scavengers of Cairo, and renowned for her television appearances in France as an advocate for the poor. She died Monday at a retirement home operated by her order, the Congregation of Notre-Dame de Sion, in Callian, in the south of France.

She was immediately praised by the Vatican, her work and achievement likened to those of Mother Teresa. A spokeswoman for her charitable organization, the Sister Emmanuelle Association, confirmed the death. She was 99 and would have turned 100 next month.

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Hyperactive, overbearing and unpredictable. Such was the damning verdict many European neighbors had unofficially rendered about President Nicolas Sarkozy as France took over the presidency of the European Union in July.

But three months later, the very characteristics that made British and German officials cringe have proved effective, even essential, in forging a swift European response to two major crises: the Georgia-Russia war and the ongoing global financial turmoil.

As one grudgingly admiring German diplomat put it, speaking anonymously because of the delicacy of the subject, “In a time of crisis, hyperactive becomes energetic, overbearing becomes dogged, and unpredictable becomes pragmatic.”

Sarkozy, Europe’s longtime enfant terrible, is on a roll – even if partly by accident.

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The French have always found American elections amusing, in a horror movie sort of way. They grumpily regard the American president as in some unfortunate sense also their own, but they see the campaign through their own cultural lens.

They value sophistication above almost anything, and so they regard their own hyperactive president, Nicolas Sarkozy, with his messy romantic life and model-singer wife, as “Sarko the American.”

But this year has been difficult for the French. Sarkozy has generally supported American foreign policy and has praised the United States’ openness and entrepreneurial verve. And the sudden emergence of Senator Barack Obama–black, and seen as elegant and engaged with the larger world– has sent many French into a swoon.

But the combination of two recent surprises– Governor Sarah Palin and America’s terrifying financial meltdown– has brought older, nearly instinctual anti-American responses back to the surface.

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The Archbishop of Canter­bury this week preached at an inter­national mass in Lourdes, in the French Pyrenees, as part of the 150th-anniversary celebrations of St Bernadette’s visions of the Virgin Mary.

Dr Williams was taking part in a pilgrimage of bishops, clergy, and laity from the Church of England, including the Suffragan Bishop in Europe, the Rt Revd David Hamid, which was organised by the Anglican Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham and the Society of Mary.

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The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, was today branded a ”˜papal puppet’ after he became the first leader of the Church of England to accept visions of the Virgin Mary at Lourdes as historical fact.

He asserted that 18 visions of Our Lady allegedly experienced by Bernadette Soubirous in 1858 were true.

His words shocked millions of Protestants worldwide because they not only signified a break with Protestant teaching on the Virgin Mary but also Dr Williams’s personal acceptance of the Catholic doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, which is explicitly linked to the apparitions.

The archbishop made his remarks during a three-day visit to the shrine in the French Pyrenees – the first ever by a leader of the Church of England.

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An initial confidence that the global crisis would spare France is eroding. A poll taken Wednesday and Thursday of about 1,000 adults and published Friday in Le Figaro found that 80 percent of the French expected “a grave economic crisis” at home. Some 94 percent expected the United States to undergo such a trauma. Sixty-six percent said that Mr. Sarkozy’s government could not protect France from the aftershocks, and only 14 percent that it could.

Eric Le Boucher, an economist and editor, said Thursday that “it’s frustrating for Europeans to think they are paying for the excesses of the American financial system,” according to Jacques Mistral, head of economic studies at the French Institute of International Relations.

Élie Cohen, director of research at the Center for Political Research at the Paris Institute of Political Studies, known as Sciences Po, and a member of the government’s Council of Economic Advisers, was blunter. “There’s certainly an idea that the American financial system has gone crazy,” he said in an interview. “This has dealt a mortal blow to the timid admiration we had of the American system. But not even the most conservative French person is capable of defending it anymore.”

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Is the Catholic Church a beleaguered underdog, fighting for a voice in secular Europe, or a still-mighty power, wielding its influence on European law through friendly center-right governments?

That question, which has been building momentum throughout Pope Benedict XVI’s three-year-old papacy, came mightily to the fore in his recent trip to France.

Yet even as the pope calls for more animated discussion of church and state and more interreligious dialogue, no one, probably not even at the Vatican, expects Europe to become newly devout any time soon. Mass attendance is at record lows, as is the number of priests.

Nor does anyone expect France to overturn its dearly held tenet of “laïcité,” a strict separation of church and state, in spite of the pope’s admonition that secularism leads to nihilism and President Nicolas Sarkozy’s calls for a more “positive laïcité.”

But Benedict’s insistence that religion and politics be “open” to each other ”” coupled with his strong renewal while in Lourdes of the church’s opposition to same-sex couples, communion for the divorced and euthanasia ”” sends a direct message: the church doesn’t want European law to be at odds with church teaching, and he wants Catholics to make some noise about it.

Read it all from yesterday’s New York Times.

Benedict XVI sent a message to the president of France thanking him for the country’s warm welcome this weekend.

The Pope returned to Castel Gandolfo today, after a four-day trip to Paris and Lourdes.

The Holy Father arrived in Paris on Friday, and met with political, religious and cultural leaders before meeting with France’s youth in front of the Notre-Dame cathedral. On Saturday the Holy Father celebrated a Mass at the Esplanade des Invalides, which was attended by 260,000 people.

He traveled to Lourdes in the afternoon to participate in the celebrations surrounding the 150th anniversary of the apparitions of Our Lady to St. Bernadette Soubirous.

In Lourdes the Pope visited all the stages of the Jubilee Way: the parish church where Bernadette was baptized, the abandoned prison known as the “Cachot” where the Soubirous family lived, the grotto of the apparitions and hospital oratory where Bernadette made her first Communion.

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It looks like Europe’s most proudly secular country is about to become less secular.

The French Republic, belligerently secular since the Revolution, and whose separation of church and state is encoded in a 1905 law, may start according a special role to the Catholic Church; that at least is one interpretation of comments by President Nicolas Sarkozy that a new, “positive secularity” should recognise the central place of religion in the country. “It would be crazy to deprive ourselves of religion” he said – “[it would be] a failing against culture and against thought”.

His remarks came on Friday as he welcomed Pope Benedict XVI to France, who is visiting to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the supposed appearance of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Lourdes. Opposition figures united in condemnation of the President – to such an extent that on Sunday the Pope had to reassure nervous anti-clericalists that the Church does not seek to usurp the state.

France and Britain could hardly be more different….

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Pope Benedict XVI urged more than 150,000 followers at mass Sunday in the French shrine town of Lourdes to hold firm in their faith, telling them “love is stronger than evil.”

The 81-year-old pontiff celebrated an open-air mass to mark the 150th anniversary of what Roman Catholics believe were the apparitions of the Virgin Mary to a French peasant girl.

Under clear skies, the pontiff spoke from a white podium set up on a sprawling field near the grotto where the Madonna is said to have appeared 18 times to Bernadette Soubirous in 1858.

The pope urged the faithful to adhere to the teachings of Mary that “tell us that there is a love in this world that is stronger than death, stronger than our weaknesses and sins.”

“The power of love is stronger than the evil which threatens us,” he said.

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The main reason, I suppose, why some people dislike Lourdes is that they suspect it of commerce, miracle-mongering and idolatry. It is strange that such strictures seem not to apply to the pilgrim destination of Santiago de Compostela, the shrine of the doubtful remains of an Apostle.

Perhaps the likeness of the Spanish journey to a sporting challenge makes it seem wholesome.

The Pope is due to arrive in Lourdes this afternoon and preach four times tomorrow, for the 150th anniversary of the appearance of the Virgin Mary to Bernadette Soubirous.

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