Pope John Paul stepped slowly down the steps of the Alitalia jet at Orly airport yesterday morning. Over the next eight hours of the sweltering August day, the 77 year-old Pontiff - who suffers from Parkinson's disease - met for an hour with the president of France, commemorated a French priest's crusade for the poor, lunched at UNESCO and presided over a two-hour outdoor World Youth Days ceremony beneath the Eiffel Tower.
The stamina of the fragile, ageing Pope seemed nothing short of miraculous. "It is surprising in an old man bent under the weight of his years," Gen Philippe Morillon, the former commander of UN forces in Bosnia and one of the chief organisers of the World Youth Days, told The Irish Times. "But his mind is extraordinarily agile." The Pope is scheduled to travel to Brazil in October and Cuba in January.
President Jacques Chirac has known John Paul II for many years, and the French leader grasped the Pontiff warmly by both hands at the bottom of the aircraft stairs. Mrs Bernadette Chirac, wearing a black lace mantilla, bowed before him. The greetings of France's Socialist interior and foreign ministers and the Communist minister for youth and sports were more chilly. The centuries-old rift between French secularists, mostly on the political left, and practicing Catholics on the right, was evident in the official welcome.
At the Elysee presidential palace, 54 republican guards waited in the sun, wearing helmets crested with red rooster feathers and clutching FAMAS assault rifles with bayonets fixed. "This is the standard reception for a head of state," an officer said - the line used by the government to derail criticism of its support for the World Youth Days. "But this is something special," the officer then admitted, noting that Saint Genevieve is the republican guards' patron saint.
Lest anyone doubt that the separation of church and state in France was in temporary retreat, the Pope was introduced minutes later as "His Holiness", and President Chirac addressed him as "Most Holy Father".
The impression of a capital encamped by Christian soldiers is inescapable. Most Parisians are away on their summer holidays, and the streets and underground are filled with 300,000 foreign participants in the youth festival who march onto metro platforms singing hymns and chanting slogans like "His name will live".
Both Mr Chirac and John Paul II focused their remarks on the problems of youth. "You are a guide, a reference," Mr Chirac, told the Pontiff. "My coming to Paris marks a new step in a kind of grand journey which I have made with young people across the world," the Pope replied. "Many of them . . . experience sufferings generated by fratricidal conflicts . . . often they face uncertainty with regard to employment, and even extreme poverty. Their generation is involved in a difficult search not only for a minimum of material necessities, but also for reasons for living."
At his first public appearance during the four-day visit to France, the Pope honoured a French priest of Polish origin, Father Joseph Wresinski, who founded the charity Aide a Toute Detresse Quart-Monde. The legacy of Father Wresinski, who died in 1988, contrasts sharply with the crystal, gilt and satin splendour of the Elysee palace. After serving as chaplain to a shanty-town of homeless people, Father Joseph was put under surveillance by French authorities, who found him suspicious. "Wherever men are condemned to live in poverty, human rights are violated," he told a crowd of 100,000 in 1987 on the spot visited by the Pope yesterday.