Pope Benedict XVI, who has arrived in Paris for a three-day visit to France, will meet with representatives of the French Jewish community. The meeting will take place on Friday at the Vatican nuncio's residence, in the presence of Parisan archbishop André Vingt-Trois. The Jewish delegation will be led by Richard Prasquier, head of CRIF, the umbrella group of French Jewish institutions and an expert in Jewish-Catholic relations.
The current and future chief rabbis of France, Joseph Sitruk and Gilles Bernheim, will also attend the meeting with Benedict. France is home to an estimated 35 million baptized Catholics, although polls show the French have lost much of their sense of belonging to the church over recent decades, and only 51 per cent of the French population consider themselves Catholic, down from 80 per cent in the early 1990s. France also has the largest Jewish community in Europe, and the third-largest in the world.
President Nicolas Sarkozy met the Pope at the airport and hosted an official reception at the Elysée Palace. Earlier this week, his eldest son Jean married the heiress of a Jewish family that had founded one of France's biggest electrical goods retail chain.
