LUXEMBOURG — LUXEMBOURG (AP) — Pope Francis began his journey Thursday to once-strong bastions of Christianity in the heart of Europe, aiming to reinvigorate a Catholic flock in decline in the face of secular trends and abuse scandals that have largely emptied the continent’s magnificent cathedrals and village churches.
Pope Francis landed mid-morning Thursday in Luxembourg, the European Union’s second-smallest country (population 660,000) and the richest country per capita. He arrived under stormy skies and strong winds, days after the 87-year-old pope canceled his audiences due to a mild bout of flu.
Francis greeted reporters as they left Rome on Thursday, but declined to walk to the altar to greet them one by one as he usually does.
“I don’t feel fit for this trip. I’ll greet you from here,” he said, referring to the trip down the aisle. Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni said the decision was due to the logistics of the plane, with only one aisle, and the short duration of the flight, and did not reflect the pope’s health.
Francis later appeared in good spirits when he met separately with Grand Duke Henri and Luxembourg Prime Minister Luc Frieden at the ducal palace.
Migration, climate change and peace are likely to be the topics discussed during the visit, which will continue later Thursday with Francis’ arrival in Belgium.
EU figures show that just half of Luxembourg’s residents, 52.6%, are native citizens, with 37.2% coming from other EU countries such as Portugal and 10.2% from outside the EU.
After his meetings, Francis will address the country’s Catholic priests and nuns. The venue is the late-Gothic Notre Dame Cathedral, built in the early 1600s by Francis’ Jesuit order and a monument to Christianity’s long-standing centrality in European history.
The trip is a much-truncated version of St. John Paul II’s ten-day tour of Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands in 1985, during which the Polish pope delivered 59 speeches or homilies and was greeted by hundreds of thousands of adoring faithful.
In Luxembourg alone, John Paul II drew a crowd of some 45,000 people to his mass, about 10 percent of the population at the time, and officials predicted that a million people would greet him in Belgium, according to reports at the time.
The head of the Catholic Church has already faced indifference, even hostility, toward the Vatican’s core teachings on contraception and sexual morality, opposition that has only grown more pronounced over time. These secular trends and the crisis caused by clergy abuse have contributed to the decline of the Church in the region, with monthly Mass attendance falling below 10 percent and a drop in new priest ordinations.
Bruni said that by visiting the two countries, Francis would likely want to offer “a word to the heart of Europe, its history, the role it wants to play in the world in the future.”
In Luxembourg, Francis has a prominent ally and friend in the country’s only cardinal, Jean-Claude Hollerich, another Jesuit.
In an article published this week in the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, Hollerich also blamed migration and the influx of people of other faiths or no faith for the changes and challenges facing the Church in Luxembourg today.
“In 1970, 96% of Luxembourgers declared themselves Catholic. It could be said that Christianity characterised the country’s identity,” Hollerich writes. “But today, the same cannot be said.”
“We can no longer look back in the hope of restoring that Church that existed half a century ago. We must try to find traces of God in today’s secularization,” he wrote.
Hollerich, whom Francis named a cardinal in 2019, has taken a leading role in the pope’s multiyear church reform effort as “general rapporteur” of his major synod, or meeting, on the future of the Catholic Church.
In that capacity, Hollerich helped oversee local, national and continental consultations of grassroots Catholics and synthesized their views into working papers for bishops and other delegates to discuss at their meetings at the Vatican, the second session of which opens next week.
Last year, in a further show of esteem for the progressive cardinal, Francis appointed Hollerich to his cabinet, known as the Council of Cardinals. This group of nine prelates from around the world meets several times a year at the Vatican to help Francis govern.
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Casert reported from Brussels. AP researcher Rhonda Shafner contributed from New York.
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