VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Francis on Thursday began his trip to once-strong bastions of Christianity in the heart of Europe in an effort to reinvigorate a Catholic flock that is dwindling in the face of secular trends and abuse scandals that have largely emptied the continent’s magnificent cathedrals and village churches.
Francis landed mid-morning Thursday in Luxembourg, the European Union’s second-smallest country, with a population of some 660,000 people, and its richest per capita. Francis arrived under stormy skies and blustery, damp conditions, days after the 87-year-old pope canceled his audiences because of a slight flu.
Francis greeted journalists at the start of Thursday’s flight from Rome but declined to walk down the aisle to greet them one by one as he typically does.
“I don’t feel up to the trip. I’ll greet you from here,” he said, referring to the trip down the aisle. The Vatican spokesman, Matteo Bruni, said the decision was due to the logistics of the aircraft, with just a single aisle, and the short duration of the flight, and was not a reflection of Francis’ health.
Francis later seemed in fine spirits as he met separately with Grand Duke Henri and Luxembourg’s Prime Minister Luc Frieden at the duke’s palace.
Migration, climate change and peace are likely to be themes during the visit, which continues later Thursday with Francis’ arrival in Belgium.
EU figures show that barely half of Luxembourg inhabitants, or 52.6%, are native citizens, with 37.2% coming from other EU nations like Portugal and 10.2% from outside the EU.
After his meetings, Francis will speak to the country’s Catholic priests and nuns. The venue is the late-Gothic Cathedral of Notre Dame, which was built in the early 1600s by Francis’ own Jesuit order and stands as a monument to Christianity’s long and central place in European history.
The trip is a much-truncated version of the 10-day tour St. John Paul II made through 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 drew a crowd of some 45,000 people to his Mass, or some 10% of the then-population, and officials had predicted a million people would welcome him in Belgium, according to news reports at the time.
Even then, the head of the Catholic Church faced indifference and even hostility to core Vatican teachings on contraception and sexual morals, opposition that has only increased over time. Those secular trends and the crisis over clergy abuse have helped lead to the decline of the church in the region, with monthly Mass attendance in the single digits and plummeting ordinations of new priests.
Bruni said that by traveling to the two countries, Francis will likely want to offer “a word to the heart of Europe, of its history, the role it wants to play in the world in the future.”
In Luxembourg, Francis has a top ally and friend in the lone cardinal from the country, Jean-Claude Hollerich, a fellow Jesuit.
In an article this week in the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, Hollerich also blamed migration and the influx of people of other faiths or none for the changes and challenges confronting the church in Luxembourg today.
“In 1970, 96% of the people from Luxembourg declared themselves Catholic. We can say that Christianity characterized the identity of the country,” Hollerich wrote. “But today, you cannot say the same.”
“We can no longer look back in the hope of restoring that church that existed a half-century ago. We have to try to find traces of God in the current secularization,” he wrote.
Hollerich, whom Francis made a cardinal in 2019, has taken on a leading role in the pope’s multi-year church reform effort as the “general rapporteur” of his big synod, or meeting, on the future of the Catholic Church.
In that capacity, Hollerich has helped oversee local, national and continental-wide consultations of rank-and-file Catholics and synthesized their views into working papers for bishops and other delegates to discuss at their Vatican meetings, the second session of which opens next week.
Last year, in another sign of his esteem for the progressive cardinal, Francis appointed Hollerich to serve in his kitchen cabinet, known as the Council of Cardinals. The group of nine prelates from around the globe 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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