The official announcement of the Pope's visit to Ajaccio is postponed. What meaning should we give to this decision?
This is a very special situation since we know that this postponement is due to two things. On the one hand, the fact that all the security conditions have not yet been verified, I know that they are underway in Ajaccio at this very moment. On the other hand, there is the pope's health which is always obviously a fragility, one more vulnerability in his agenda. We still know that last year, at exactly the same time, the papal flight which was scheduled for Dubai, on which I was registered to follow the Pope to COP 28, this trip was canceled at the last moment due to of the pope's state of health.
There are these unknowns, and then there is another, which is more of a political nature. It is the susceptibility that this trip provokes. The French capital is a little angry by the fact that the Pope did not accept Emmanuel Macron's invitation to come and inaugurate the reopening of Notre-Dame. And finally, there are also the bishops, gathered in Lourdes last week in plenary conference, who, on this occasion, discovered the agenda of this visit and they too were offended. Is the postponement of the officialization of the pope's visit just a delay to resolve these questions of sensitivity? As far as I'm concerned, I would say yes.
