AJACCIO, France: Pope Francis was welcomed Sunday by cheering crowds in Corsica, a stronghold of the Catholic faith, in the first-ever trip by a pontiff to the French Mediterranean island.
Sitting in a wheelchair and wearing his white vestments and skullcap, a smiling Francis was greeted on the tarmac by French Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau and a military band as he emerged from the papal plane.
Television images showed him handing local children small gifts after they brought him flowers, with a bruise still visible on his face from a fall several days ago.
Francis went on to process through the packed streets of Corsica’s capital Ajaccio in his popemobile, blessing children and a 108-year-old woman.
Local authorities said around 12,000 people had turned out to greet the pope.
“Coming here is unique, being here just a few days from Christmas,” said Xavier Luigi, 55.
“He couldn’t have given a better Christmas gift to all us Corsicans”.
The first stop in a packed timetable for the 87-year-old pontiff was making closing remarks at a congress on religion in the Mediterranean.
He used the address to call for “a concept of secularity that is not static and fixed, but evolving and dynamic”.
The remarks touched on a sensitive topic for France, where strict state secularism was originally introduced to curb the influence of the Church on public life but is now more commonly deployed against symbols of Islam such as the headscarf or hijab.
No to ‘divisions’
Francis will go on to celebrate an open-air mass and meet President Emmanuel Macron before his departure around 6pm (1700 GMT).
Ajaccio was decked out in decorations in the papal colours, yellow and white, while cars had been banished from central streets with parking bans.
Around 2,000 police reinforcements were sent to Ajaccio to beef up security.
Francis’s short trip comes just a week after he snubbed the re-opening of Notre Dame cathedral in Paris five years after a devastating fire - attended by world leaders including Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky.
But he agreed to the Corsica trip hosted by the island’s popular, media-savvy cardinal, 56-year-old Francois-Xavier Bustillo.
Workers repainted the facade of Ajaccio’s Notre-Dame de l’Assomption cathedral and built a wheelchair ramp for Francis, who has limited mobility, to enter by its main door.
New pews have been delivered and yellow-and-white flags hung behind the altar.
Near the cathedral, a colourful street-art style fresco by Ajaccio artists shows Francis in front of stained-glass windows and a map of Corsica.
Around 90 percent of Corsica’s 350,000 inhabitants are Catholic, according to the local Church.
The pope has made several visits around the Mediterranean, from the Greek island of Lesbos to Malta and Sicily.
But this is the first visit by a pope to Corsica, a French region with a distinctive identity, fierce independence movement and a special constitutional status currently under discussion between Paris and local elected officials.
In his Sunday morning remarks, Francis warned against religious feeling being “exploited by groups that seek self-aggrandisement by fuelling polemics, narrow-mindedness, divisions and exclusivist attitudes”.
The message comes as a new far-right Corsican nationalist movement, Mossa Palatina, campaigns to “reaffirm the primacy of Catholicism” and ensure that “Corsica never becomes another Lampedusa” - the Italian island where many migrants hoping to reach Europe have landed.
The pope himself has long advocated for welcoming migrants.
Troubled ties with France?
It is Francis’s third visit to France as pope, after eastern city Strasbourg in 2014 and Mediterranean port Marseille last year - although none has been an official state visit to the country.
Some have seen that as a sign of his disapproval of French policy changes away from Church doctrine during his papacy, including on gay marriage and an ongoing public debate about assisted dying.
Some French Catholics have expressed disappointment that the pope stayed away from Notre Dame’s grand reopening.
Francis’s defenders highlight that the pontiff, concerned with the world’s marginalised people, largely shuns capital cities and sumptuous receptions.
Born in Argentina, he has never visited Spain, Britain or Germany as pope.
Even in the Vatican, he prefers closed-door audiences with pilgrims, homeless people or migrants to meetings with the powerful.
Recent health problems have not kept the pope from looking in good form in recent months.
The Corsica visit will be his 47th overseas trip since his 2013 election and the third in 2024.
