DEBORAH POTTER, correspondent: One iconic image of the Paris that tourists come to see is Notre Dame Cathedral, a centuries-old symbol of Roman Catholicism in France. But inside this Catholic church in Paris, the sparse congregation reflects a wider truth: Christianity is on the wane across Western Europe, and nowhere is its decline more visible than in France.

REV. MICHEL BRIERE: The eldest daughter of the Church, that’s what we were called. Today, saying you believe in a religion takes a real identification of faith. Today, the number has really diminished.

POTTER: Twenty years ago, about 80 percent of French people described themselves as Catholic. Today, it’s just over half and less than 5 percent—most of them older—regularly go to Mass. Father Briere blames a growing culture of consumerism and a Catholic hierarchy that he says has been too rigid, failing to draw young people into the Church. That’s true across Europe, but France is a special case, a country where religion is widely seen as a source of trouble. If France had an official religion it would be laicite or secularism, a principle that’s enshrined in this country’s constitution and reflects its history of religious wars between Catholics and Protestants, as well as the French Revolution, that basically booted the Catholic Church from power.

That history lives on in French movies and classrooms, where students are taught in gory detail about a 16^th-century massacre, when thousands of Protestants [Huguenots] were slaughtered by the Catholic forces of the King. And that history still lies on public display in Paris. These are the bones of Catholic priests killed and mutilated by a revolutionary mob in 1792—small wonder that the French concept of separation of church and state is strikingly different from that in the US, says Jocelyne Cesari, a French political scientist and research fellow at Harvard.

PROFESSOR JOCELYNE CESARI (Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University): There is this idea that the state has a responsibility in France to control and regulate religion that otherwise can lead to civil war.

POTTER: That control extends to the churches themselves, including Notre Dame, which all became state property 100 years ago, along with existing synagogues. Another example: in France, for a marriage to be legal it has to take place at a city hall. Church weddings are ceremonial but not official, and the wall between church and state doesn’t end there.

CESARI: In the French case it means also restraining or limiting as much as possible the public manifestation or expression of religious groups. In other words, in France it’s better if you act civilly with no religious affiliation. It’s seen as more legitimate, while in America it’s quite the opposite.

POTTER: But the idea that religion should be kept private has collided with the reality that France has changed. Islam is now the country’s second biggest religion. France has the largest Muslim population in Europe—almost five million, twice as many as in the United States, according to recent estimates. Many are the French-born children and grandchildren of Muslim immigrants from former colonies like Algeria, who moved to France after independence in the 1960s.

M’HAMMED HENICHE (Union of Muslim Associations): Those who practice today are not the same as those who practiced before. They were people who came from their homelands, immigrants, so they tried to be as quiet as possible. Today, these are French people who never set foot in the Middle East or Africa. They were born here, grew up here, and they are practicing Muslims and they are reclaiming their religion. They see themselves as French and Muslim. Why would they hide their religion?

POTTER: They may not want to hide it, but in some cases they’re being forced to. Over the past decade, the French government has clamped down on the display of religious symbols. Since 2004, students have not been allowed to wear headscarves, large crosses, or skullcaps in public schools. The result: new Muslim schools like this one, where every girl in this 11^th-grade class wears a headscarf. “We come because we can wear it,” one of them says.

This year the government went further, banning the niqab or full-face veil not just in schools but in all public places. The law affects a tiny minority of Muslims—only a few hundred women wear it in France—but those who do were outraged.

WOMAN: When I hear France—liberty, equality, fraternity—it’s a big lie. I feel like I’m in a dictatorship.

VERONIQUE RIEFFEL (Islamic Cultures institute): The ban is a very bad thing because, you know, every Muslim, even men and even women who don’t wear the niqab, feel concerned, you know, feel rejected by this ban.

POTTER: But the vast majority in France approved of the ban—80 percent, according to public opinion polls.

WOMAN: Look, I think secularism is indispensable. It’s a protection so everyone has peace, believers and non-believers, and so all these religious, fanatic excesses are regrettable, appalling. I’m very much a feminist. I hate the idea of the veil.

POTTER: Despite the new laws, a very public display of religion takes place every Friday in this Paris neighborhood. Two streets are closed to traffic so thousands of Muslim men can pray outside a mosque that’s much too small to hold them all, largely because of property costs. France has just 2,000 prayer rooms and a few dozen full-sized mosques. While the community solicits donations to build new ones, the local government allows this public exercise of religion, to the annoyance of some non-Muslims. There are other chinks in the wall of secularism. Religious schools can receive state funding. Most national holidays come from the Catholic Church calendar, and once a year Catholics from all over flood the streets of Paris as they leave on a three-day, 75-mile pilgrimage to the Cathedral of Chartres.

OLIVIER BOBINEAU (Paris Institute of Political Studies): But people don’t like it. They don’t like it, even Catholics. The pilgrimage to Chartres? Those are fundamentalists , traditionalists. Our culture erases religion. We’re here but we don’t show ourselves.

POTTER: Olivier Bobineau teaches the sociology of religion and lives it himself. He’s a Catholic who wears a small cross on a chain that he keeps hidden most of the time. But one night, at a meeting with high government officials…

(speaking to Bobineau): … so you leaned forward, you could see it, and somebody said..

BOBINEAU: Be careful.

POTTER: … put that away.

BOBINEAU: Yeah. Today it’s unimaginable to go against the state, against the public space, and to show a cross, a skullcap, a veil. It’s impossible. It’s wanting to destroy the state. That’s what the French feel. The majority of French people do not think it’s possible to be French and Muslim. Most French people think you can’t be a citizen and believe in God. We are the most atheist people in the world. Why? Because when you are a believer, in France people think you have lost your freedom, your reason, okay?

POTTER: The French also remember the violence that broke out across the country a few years ago. For two weeks, young Muslims angry about unemployment and discrimination took to the streets and burned thousands of cars, and that anger has not entirely subsided.

HENICHE: We are a little anxious. I have to tell the truth. We are anxious. You sense it among the faithful because the faithful are returning to the mosque. Maybe that’s a positive thing. It’s pushing Muslims to return to the mosque. They sense a threat, that the days ahead won’t be better days for us.

POTTER: The tension comes down to a fundamental disconnect, with French Catholics seeing Islam through their own secular prism.

CESARI: What they are expecting from Muslims is this kind of very loose connection with no particular affiliation to Islamic organization, with no particular desire to dress differently or to eat differently, but okay, you can be buried as a Muslim or you can marry in your—you can have a religious ceremony in your mosque. This would be okay.

POTTER: Underlying the debate over Muslim dress is the question of security after 9/11.

BOBINEAU: People say that’s what religion is. It’s violence. Look at the news, the Twin Towers, bin Laden. The news reinforces the illusion that this is a war of civilizations.

HENICHE: We think we have work to do to convince the French people, to show them that Muslims are patriots, and the proof and history is with us.

POTTER: The Great Mosque of Paris is one piece of that history, built by the French government in the 1920s to honor Muslim soldiers who fought and died in World War I. At this cemetery outside Paris, the only all-Islamic burial ground in France, each grave represents a Muslim family’s decision to call France home. The new generation sees itself as both Muslim and French, no matter how uncomfortable that makes their secular countrymen.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Deborah Potter in Paris.

Originally broadcast June 19, 2009

FRED DE SAM LAZARO (guest anchor): Earlier this month in France an annual event took place that has been described as perhaps the largest public expression of traditional Catholicism in the world. It is a three-day, 72-mile pilgrimage from Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris to the cathedral at Chartres. A history professor from New York City who has made the pilgrimage several times describes the experience.

Dr. JOHN RAO (Associate Professor of History, St. John’s University, New York): My name is John Rao. I’m associate professor of history at St. John’s University. I’ve done the pilgrimage to Chartres about six or seven times. The regular preparations involve making sure you’ve got the right footwear more than anything else. Being a New Yorker and not owning a car, I walk a lot.

You’ve started from a point, Notre Dame, which has this extraordinary impact on you because of its beauty and because of the fervor of the people praying and singing in it. And what the architecture of the cathedral and the light passing through the windows does is it makes it clear that God, the Father of lights, provides us a world which was incredibly more diverse and beautiful than anyone might think.

The route to Chartres begins the first morning mostly in Paris and the surrounding areas.

When we’re talking about the people who make up the pilgrimage, the first thing to note is that probably about 70 percent of them are young people — people in their late teens and in their early 20s. There are people from all over Europe. The majority are French, of course, but from every country that I can imagine, from Africa, from Asia, from the United States.

A lot of these chapters are groups that stick together at home, and they have a lot of their own particular songs, which are not specifically religious but more focused on just subjects involving history and culture of the country as well.

It’s so clear, it’s so sunny. By the afternoon people are going to start suffering from heat. The big thing for people who haven’t done it before is to get them to drink water.

The Mass on the first day is usually in a field. The Masses that are held during the pilgrimage and at Chartres itself are the traditional Latin Mass. In other words, the liturgy before the reforms that are associated with Pope Paul VI.

You have, perhaps, certainly at least 100 priests who are hearing confessions during all of this, and they’re scattered all through these lunch scenes and in the woods and in little deserted areas.

Their Catholicism is a fervent Catholicism, traditional in the sense that it’s very much focused on a spirituality that uses the traditional liturgy of the Church, takes that very seriously, the traditional devotions, the traditional Latin liturgy. And then they have to give communion to as many as 10,000 people.

The pilgrimage began in the Middle Ages. Chartres was always an important place and had great meaning in the life of the Christian world in the kingdom of France in the Middle Ages. Joan of Arc made this pilgrimage. Louis XIV, I believe, made the pilgrimage. After Vatican II there were — there was a lot of confusion that developed in Catholic believers’ minds about what they ought to be doing, what they ought not to be doing, whether they were putting too much of an emphasis on particular practices that somehow or other had become outmoded, and as a consequence things like pilgrimages ended up suffering. It resumed precisely due to the concerns of groups that, by this point, were calling themselves traditionalists who wanted to commit themselves to maintaining practices which they felt to be, spiritually, extremely beneficial.

The second day of the pilgrimage, the Mass is in the woods — same kind of Mass, beautiful music, priests hearing confession.

MICHAEL MATT (speaking to pilgrims): My name is Michael Matt. I’m the head of the American contingent, the American chapter for the Chartres pilgrimage.

It’s definitely a youth movement. They very easily, in many instances, can really tap into this whole tradition, the foundation of the Catholic faith. It doesn’t matter that they don’t understand every word of the Latin. They’re attracted to the centrality of the liturgy. They’re attracted to the rubric and the ritual and to the idea of suffering for what you believe in.

PILGRIM: Can you smell the grass? Can you feel your feet? This is the real world, especially when you put rosaries into it, traditional Masses, allegiance to the Holy Father. This is the real world that we’re all seeking for.

Dr. RAO: The entire pilgrimage is of an impact that’s hard to describe. A pilgrimage is a microcosm of what life is. Life, from a Catholic standpoint, is a pilgrimage—from birth to death, from our birth to our ultimate, eternal experience with God—and what the pilgrimage does is it takes you, for a short space of time, to a time out of time. You’re out of your ordinary daily experiences. All of the ordinary things that bother one during the course of a day just disappear, even to the point in a physical way that, after a couple of days, you don’t care what you look like.

PILGRIM: I’m pretty tired, but other than that it’s invigorating. Spiritually lifted, that’s for sure. It’s amazing to be with tons of Catholics — thousands of them.

Dr. RAO: I find myself thinking about everything that I ought to do in life — everything that I have done wrong. I go back through all of the experiences of my life and where I thought that I should have done something better.

The third day, the last day of the pilgrimage, everyone is exuberant, because if you’d made it to that last day you know you’re going to make it. You know you’re really going to make it. You’re in forests, you’re in fields — endless, endless fields. You at least get to see, after a certain point, the spires of Chartres in front of you. It can become particularly grueling because it takes a long time for that spire in the distance to really get truly bigger.

There was more of a, maybe a penitential spirit yesterday, but today it’s joy. It’s just joy. When you get onto the roads, in the real suburbs of Chartres, then you can see it looming more and more, and then you begin this walk, which is a last torturous walk up this long shaded path that takes you up into the town itself. That’s when you see it there, you know, in all of its glory.

What most stirs me up is the fact that you’ve managed to do it. You’ve managed to do it. You’ve finished it. When we’re at Chartres we have a solemn High Mass, and all of this is surrounded with a great deal of ritual and ceremony.

You could see 10,000, or 15,000 fervent Catholics, most of them young people, deeply committed to this traditional rite of Mass. These people who are part of the pilgrimage, and then who finish the pilgrimage with us as well, their spiritual fervor is accompanied with, again, a great love for music. By the time it’s over, the feeling of exaltation is hard to describe, just hard to describe.

The newer generation found what that old rite had to offer — spiritually satisfying, spiritually uplifting, and in a way that you could see almost in no other event that took place in the annual life of the church. The entire three days is emotional.

What to do in the future? This spirit of pilgrimage should be continued on the day-to-day basis for the rest of your life.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO (guest anchor): Earlier this month in France an annual event took place that has been described as perhaps the largest public expression of traditional Catholicism in the world. It is a three-day, 72-mile pilgrimage from Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris to the cathedral at Chartres. A history professor from New York City who has made the pilgrimage several times describes the experience.

Dr. JOHN RAO (Associate Professor of History, St. John’s University, New York): My name is John Rao. I’m associate professor of history at St. John’s University. I’ve done the pilgrimage to Chartres about six or seven times. The regular preparations involve making sure you’ve got the right footwear more than anything else. Being a New Yorker and not owning a car, I walk a lot.

You’ve started from a point, Notre Dame, which has this extraordinary impact on you because of its beauty and because of the fervor of the people praying and singing in it. And what the architecture of the cathedral and the light passing through the windows does is it makes it clear that God, the Father of lights, provides us a world which was incredibly more diverse and beautiful than anyone might think.

The route to Chartres begins the first morning mostly in Paris and the surrounding areas.

When we’re talking about the people who make up the pilgrimage, the first thing to note is that probably about 70 percent of them are young people — people in their late teens and in their early 20s. There are people from all over Europe. The majority are French, of course, but from every country that I can imagine, from Africa, from Asia, from the United States.

A lot of these chapters are groups that stick together at home, and they have a lot of their own particular songs, which are not specifically religious but more focused on just subjects involving history and culture of the country as well.

It’s so clear, it’s so sunny. By the afternoon people are going to start suffering from heat. The big thing for people who haven’t done it before is to get them to drink water.

The Mass on the first day is usually in a field. The Masses that are held during the pilgrimage and at Chartres itself are the traditional Latin Mass. In other words, the liturgy before the reforms that are associated with Pope Paul VI.

You have, perhaps, certainly at least 100 priests who are hearing confessions during all of this, and they’re scattered all through these lunch scenes and in the woods and in little deserted areas.

Their Catholicism is a fervent Catholicism, traditional in the sense that it’s very much focused on a spirituality that uses the traditional liturgy of the Church, takes that very seriously, the traditional devotions, the traditional Latin liturgy. And then they have to give communion to as many as 10,000 people.

The pilgrimage began in the Middle Ages. Chartres was always an important place and had great meaning in the life of the Christian world in the kingdom of France in the Middle Ages. Joan of Arc made this pilgrimage. Louis XIV, I believe, made the pilgrimage. After Vatican II there were — there was a lot of confusion that developed in Catholic believers’ minds about what they ought to be doing, what they ought not to be doing, whether they were putting too much of an emphasis on particular practices that somehow or other had become outmoded, and as a consequence things like pilgrimages ended up suffering. It resumed precisely due to the concerns of groups that, by this point, were calling themselves traditionalists who wanted to commit themselves to maintaining practices which they felt to be, spiritually, extremely beneficial.

The second day of the pilgrimage, the Mass is in the woods — same kind of Mass, beautiful music, priests hearing confession.

MICHAEL MATT (speaking to pilgrims): My name is Michael Matt. I’m the head of the American contingent, the American chapter for the Chartres pilgrimage.

It’s definitely a youth movement. They very easily, in many instances, can really tap into this whole tradition, the foundation of the Catholic faith. It doesn’t matter that they don’t understand every word of the Latin. They’re attracted to the centrality of the liturgy. They’re attracted to the rubric and the ritual and to the idea of suffering for what you believe in.

PILGRIM: Can you smell the grass? Can you feel your feet? This is the real world, especially when you put rosaries into it, traditional Masses, allegiance to the Holy Father. This is the real world that we’re all seeking for.

Dr. RAO: The entire pilgrimage is of an impact that’s hard to describe. A pilgrimage is a microcosm of what life is. Life, from a Catholic standpoint, is a pilgrimage—from birth to death, from our birth to our ultimate, eternal experience with God—and what the pilgrimage does is it takes you, for a short space of time, to a time out of time. You’re out of your ordinary daily experiences. All of the ordinary things that bother one during the course of a day just disappear, even to the point in a physical way that, after a couple of days, you don’t care what you look like.

PILGRIM: I’m pretty tired, but other than that it’s invigorating. Spiritually lifted, that’s for sure. It’s amazing to be with tons of Catholics — thousands of them.

Dr. RAO: I find myself thinking about everything that I ought to do in life — everything that I have done wrong. I go back through all of the experiences of my life and where I thought that I should have done something better.

The third day, the last day of the pilgrimage, everyone is exuberant, because if you’d made it to that last day you know you’re going to make it. You know you’re really going to make it. You’re in forests, you’re in fields — endless, endless fields. You at least get to see, after a certain point, the spires of Chartres in front of you. It can become particularly grueling because it takes a long time for that spire in the distance to really get truly bigger.

There was more of a, maybe a penitential spirit yesterday, but today it’s joy. It’s just joy. When you get onto the roads, in the real suburbs of Chartres, then you can see it looming more and more, and then you begin this walk, which is a last torturous walk up this long shaded path that takes you up into the town itself. That’s when you see it there, you know, in all of its glory.

What most stirs me up is the fact that you’ve managed to do it. You’ve managed to do it. You’ve finished it. When we’re at Chartres we have a solemn High Mass, and all of this is surrounded with a great deal of ritual and ceremony.

You could see 10,000, or 15,000 fervent Catholics, most of them young people, deeply committed to this traditional rite of Mass. These people who are part of the pilgrimage, and then who finish the pilgrimage with us as well, their spiritual fervor is accompanied with, again, a great love for music. By the time it’s over, the feeling of exaltation is hard to describe, just hard to describe.

The newer generation found what that old rite had to offer — spiritually satisfying, spiritually uplifting, and in a way that you could see almost in no other event that took place in the annual life of the church. The entire three days is emotional.

What to do in the future? This spirit of pilgrimage should be continued on the day-to-day basis for the rest of your life.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Forty-two years ago, in a village south of Paris, a French-Canadian named Jean Vanier created a home where the mentally disabled could live in dignity and where others could learn from them the value of sharing and acceptance. There is now a worldwide network of these communities called L’Arche, the French word for Arc, a symbol of hope. Vanier rarely leaves his community in France, but he did recently come to Chicago, as Judy Valente reports.

JUDY VALENTE: These are the people Jean Vanier calls his friends. People he describes as “pushed aside, with broken hearts.” People, he says, who have “transformed” him.

JEAN VANIER (Founder, L’Arche House): My life is to live with them — to be with those who are fragile, vulnerable and weak. I’m not sure that we can really understand the message of Jesus if we haven’t listened to the weak.

JEAN WILSON (Core Member, L’Arche House): He’s my one man and my one man only — I love this man.

VALENTE: Those who came to greet him included the residents and staff of the L’Arche house he helped establish in Chicago. The mentally challenged here are called “core members” because they represent the “core,” or heart, of L’Arche.

Mr. VANIER (at microphone with Elbert Lott): We’re different. We have different backgrounds. But we’re together.

VALENTE: Vanier introduces core member Elbert Lott, who has a mild mental disability.

ELBERT LOTT (Core Member, L’Arche House, at microphone): I had a hard time. Rough times. Barefoot boy, down south. My father be mean to me.

Mr. VANIER (quoting Mr. Lott): “My dad was mean to me.”

Mr. LOTT: He was.

Mr. VANIER: (to Mr. Lott) Because Dad wanted a son who could maybe do big things, and he looked down upon you.

Mr. LOTT: He did.

Mr. VANIER: He was mean to you.

Mr. LOTT: He was. Well, all that now behind me now. Here I am, famous.

VALENTE: Jean Vanier talks about the loneliness of people who are different — how they can feel unwanted, unloved, and therefore unlovable. But, he says, the weak and wounded have a “secret power” to touch us. And that by opening our hearts to them, we become more human.

Mr. VANIER: We become more human with two realities. One, as we discover that we are able to love people — and when I say love people, it means to see their value and their beauty — and that we can love people who have been pushed aside, humiliated, seen as having no value. And then we see that they are changed. And at the same time, we discover that we too are broken, that we have our handicaps. And our handicaps are around about elitism, about power, around feeling that value is just to have power.

VALENTE: Before coming to L’Arche, these people were in institutions, or on the streets, or in families that couldn’t care for them or didn’t want to.

Mr. VANIER: The question is not just believing in God, but believing in human people, believing in ourselves, believing in ourselves as children of God and that we are called to see people as God sees them, not as we would like them to be.

VALENTE: The son of a French-Canadian diplomat, Vanier served in the British Royal Navy during World War II, then he taught philosophy in France. He has never married. For a time, he considered the priesthood. But in 1964, he found his calling, opening the first L’Arche home in a small village south of Paris.

LINNEA FIELDS (House Coordinator, L’Arche House, to Chris Abri): And where are these mugs going?

CHRIS ABRI (Core Member, L’Arche House): Jean Vanier!

Ms. FIELDS: Jean Vanier!

VALENTE: The Chicago L’Arche community owns a home on the city’s west side. The core members, with the help of the assistants who live with them, have prepared gift packages to distribute during Vanier’s visit to the city. Some have met Vanier during his previous travels.

VALENTE (to Ms. Msall): What’s he like?

CHRISTIANNE MSALL (Core Member, L’Arche House): He’s a wonderful man.

VALENTE (to Mr. Lott): What did you talk about?

Mr. LOTT: Well, he say — I say, “He ‘da man.” And he say, “No, I was the man.”

VALENTE (to Ms. Wilson): What will you say to him when he comes?

Ms. WILSON: Come on in, we’ll give you something to eat and drink.

Mr. ABRI: I’m very, very excited to meet Jean Vanier.

VALENTE (to Mr. Abri): Why?

Mr. ABRI: Because I like him, because he’s a big tall guy and got gray hair that I like.

VALENTE: Most of the core members have outside jobs. Here, they live family-style, helping with chores and with the cooking. The homes are grounded in the Catholic faith, but core members don’t have to be Catholic to live there. Vanier refers to L’Arche communities as “little places where love is possible.”

Ms. FIELDS: They know this is their home. I’ve seen the core members grow in their self-confidence a great deal.

VALENTE: But these small communities are not without their problems.

Ms. WILSON (to Mr. Abri): Chris, get the cups! What’s the matter with you? Gee whiz.

Mr. VANIER: There are explosions, there can be violence, there can be conflicts with other assistants. There’s a sort of constant paradox that through all this suffering and pain and fatigue, at the same time we are seeing incredible beautiful things. That is to say, people who are transformed and we are beginning to sense that we ourselves are transformed.

Ms. FIELDS: I think the prayer time is what sets us apart. That’s what drew me to L’Arche, the spirituality.

And, the core members give us a great deal of insight. They’ve taught me many, many things. I’ve learned generosity. I’ve learned just how giving each one of the core members are with their selves, and their time and how forgiving they are.

Core Members, L’Arche House, praying: Jesus, we thank you that you’re here with us now.

VALENTE: Prayer, says Jean Vanier, is really about listening.

Mr. VANIER: Prayer is a sort of opening of a door to something, which gives meaning to all the pain of the finite. And yet it’s something we can just rest in. I think fundamentally, prayer is to rest.

ELBERT LOTT (at microphone, introducing Jean Vanier): He ‘da man.

VALENTE: The 77-year-old Vanier was in Chicago to accept a lifetime achievement award. He dressed for this occasion as he always dresses: in an open shirt and his trademark blue windbreaker.

Mr. VANIER: People with disabilities are not in rivalry and competition. What is their cry? Their fundamental cry, which I had the privilege to hear, is a very simple question: “Do you love me? Do you want to be my friend?” So that’s what L’Arche is about. It’s becoming a friend.

VALENTE: Vanier told this well-heeled audience that generosity is good. But he challenges people to go beyond “giving.”

Mr. VANIER: Generosity must flow into an encounter, a meeting. But a meeting must go even further. It’s not just “tell me your story” — a meeting must grow into a friendship, and a friendship must grow into a commitment – because you are my brother, you are my sister.

VALENTE: Vanier expects L’Arche to thrive long after he’s gone. People will continue to be called to these communities, he says — not because of anything he’s accomplished, but because their hearts have been touched by the weak and rejected.

Mr. VANIER (at microphone): Living in community — L’Arche — it can be painful. But it’s super. I never understand why everybody’s not there. This is my problem. We have fun together. We laugh, we sing together. It’s great!

I can say that we have seen people rising from the dead — who arrived in there closed up in their anguish, their angers. And then discovering peace.

VALENTE (to Mr. Vanier): What’s left to be done in your life?

Mr. VANIER: Ah. To die quietly.

VALENTE: But on this day, he’s content to enjoy life — with his friends.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Judy Valente in Chicago.

ABERNETHY: There are more than 130 L’Arche communities in 33 countries.

PAUL MILLER: The owner of this pharmacy not far from the Arc de Triomphe in Paris is thinking about leaving France because she is Jewish.

PAULETTE BENHAIM (through voice of translator): There is an anti-Semitism which you can feel. We are thinking about going somewhere else unless our security can be assured.

MILLER: Paulette Benhaim’s family had felt secure living in France for decades. But recently they’ve become alarmed by attacks against Jewish institutions and against Jewish children at school. They are not alone. In 2002, more than 2,300 French Jews left for Israel, twice as many as in 2001.

MICHEL FRIEDMAN (Chairman, European Jewish Congress): Jews in France and Jews in other countries are again threatened by an anti-Semitism that is growing, by right radicals, right extremists, by neo-Nazis, but also by extreme Muslims and Arabs who are using the situation for their aggression against Jewishness.

MILLER: There has always been a persistent strain of anti-Semitism here, although the French say it’s no worse than in other countries. An increase in violence — synagogues and school buses burned or vandalized, a rabbi stabbed — started last year because of events in the Middle East, specifically Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in response to suicide bombings. TV coverage of events in the Middle East, especially on Arab satellite channels watched by many Muslims here, is strongly pro-Palestinian. Jewish leaders fear that war in Iraq will mean more attacks against the country’s 700,000 Jews. American Jewish leaders who attended a recent conference in Paris between Catholics and Jews said too many French tolerate the violence.

Rabbi MARC SCHNEIER (President, North American Board of Rabbis): On the issue of anti-Semitism — that the French are bystanders, that they are afflicted with moral laryngitis — there is a deafening, deafening silence.

MILLER: But some Catholic bishops at the conference said anti-Semitism is overpublicized, and the violence is the work of a small number of young people of Arab descent.

Cardinal JEAN LUSTIGER (Archbishop of Paris): I don’t think it’s very deep nor significant. Maybe it’s very aggressive in some places.

SELIM BEN ABDELSELLEM (France Fraternite): If you speak about the Muslim-Arab community in France, I think that most of them live in peace with the rest of the French people and especially the Jewish.

MILLER: There are four to six million Muslims, mostly Arabs, in France. They are a diverse community, but there is a substantial element that has become the underclass in France — poor, unemployed, and undereducated. Four percent of immigrant children get into university, compared to 25 percent of those of French stock. They feel discriminated against and until recently have not had an official voice. In suburbs such as Montreuil, the high-rise apartment blocs are now filled with second- or third-generation Arabs and Muslims who feel neither French nor foreign and who are angry. Some are angry enough to become violent, or to join extreme Islamist organizations. Muslim leaders say the government has done little for their community.

Mr. ABDELSELLEM: I think it is necessary for them to care about this subject and to do something to change the law and to have a positive action on the way of thinking.

MILLER: The government of President Jacques Chirac says it is helping both Jews and Muslims. The government toughened penalties for anti-Semitic acts and is trying to stop anti-Semitism in schools, which the education ministry calls a real danger. It says there were almost 500 incidents in the fall term alone. It blames Arab and Muslim teenagers. France’s interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, has been denouncing discrimination in all forms.

NICOLAS SARKOZY (French Interior Minister — through voice of translator): It’s not a situation of Jews on one side and the rest on the other. All patriots who love the Republic and love France will never accept that anyone is inferior by virtue of their religion, their place of birth, or their skin color. We have zero tolerance for that kind of thinking.

MILLER: The government has now recognized Islam by naming a Muslim council that is the equal of official bodies for Catholics, Protestants, and Jews. It gives the government someone to talk to about education, employment, and possible terrorism. Minister Sarkozy said making Islam an official religion would help offset underground extremism that breeds terrorism. The government is trying to deal with tensions between two large minority communities. The concern now is that war in Iraq may exacerbate those tensions and the violence they might produce.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Paul Miller in Paris.