Corsica rather than Notre-Dame, the reasons for a choice

“I won’t go to Paris, I won’t go to Paris. » On the plane bringing him back from his trip to Asia on September 13, the Pope responded with a smile to a French journalist’s question. Was he already invited to go to Corsica on December 15, a week after the reopening of Notre-Dame? The secret was well kept, and the announcement of his very probable visit to the Isle of Beauty by the cardinal-bishop of Ajaccio, François Bustillo, surprised his fellow bishops gathered in Lourdes at the beginning of November, delighted some, irritated a few. others: this pope is definitely unpredictable!

All that was needed to revive the media machine, honed during the visit of the Bishop of Rome to Marseille, in September 2023. By not coming to Paris, this pope would be shunning France, the eldest daughter of the Church. … The grumpy people are on the wrong track.

Jorge Bergoglio knows the French spiritual heritage, appreciates the Bernanos, Péguy, Madeleine Delbrêl, François de Sales… authors whom he quotes regularly, and entrusts himself to the intercession of his dear Thérèse of Lisieux. No, today like last year, the Pope does not want a visit as head of state, which a positive response to the invitation from the President of the Republic would have implied. It will have escaped no one’s notice that Emmanuel Macron’s difficulties on the French political scene have only worsened over the past year, and if the president has everything to gain from receiving the Pope, among a hundred others heads of state, the reverse is not true.

A pastoral visit above all

The president of the Conference of Bishops of France, Mgr de Moulins-Beaufort, makes this argument in a roundabout way: “I would like to say that there was never any question of the Pope coming to the reopening of Notre-Dame of Paris, for a very simple reason: the star is the cathedral and not the Pope’s visit to France which is an event in itself! I believe the Pope understood this from the beginning. He never intended to come and divert the gaze fixed on Notre-Dame Cathedral by diverting them towards him. »

While the President of the Republic will attend the solemn mass at Notre-Dame, the Pope will award the cardinal’s bar to 21 new close collaborators. Certainly, his schedule could have been organized differently, if necessary. But Francis chose. Not between Paris and Corsica, but between diplomacy and the mission. Because the visit to Corsica, two days before his 88th birthday, stirred his missionary soul.

Since the beginning of his pontificate, the Jesuit pope has urged the Church to go out to the geographical or existential peripheries, the margins where forgotten people live, far from the centers of power. Francis comes to Corsica to conclude a conference on popular religiosity, an expression of piety that wise people and scholars have not always recognized its fair value: a form of periphery! This spiritual reality, alive on the island as on the shores of the Mediterranean or in South America, is very close to his heart. He recognized its theological and missionary density from “The Joy of the Gospel” (2013), the programmatic document of his pontificate. And she justifies some of her pastoral choices. It is attention to popular piety that governed the new standards for discerning supernatural phenomena (May 2024), and made it possible to recognize the positive fruits of pilgrimages to Medjugorje, for example.

And then, we must note the esteem in which the Pope holds François Bustillo. Enthusiastic by a book by the Capuchin monk whom he had named bishop (The vocation of the priest in the face of crises: Creative fidelityEd. Nouvelle Cité, 2021), he had it translated and distributed it to a thousand retired priests at the Vatican, before naming him a cardinal – one of the youngest in the college of cardinals – in 2023. In the company of this already popular pastor, Francis will be in contact with the Corsican people, much more than among the heads of state invited to the inauguration of the new cathedral. Nothing he loves so much.