POPE John Paul will begin his first visit to Brittany, the Loire valley and western France, predominantly Catholic areas, this morning. The sometimes controversial four day visit will end on Sunday, when he will preside over the 1,500th anniversary of the baptism of Clovis, the first French king to become a Christian, in Reims.
The Pope will fly into Tours this morning to be welcomed by President and Mrs Chirac. From there he will travel to the village of St Laurent-sur-Sevre in the Vendee, probably France's most devoutly Catholic region, and the only one to rise in popular revolt against the French Revolution.
Here he will undertake what the church authorities are calling "a personal pilgrimage" to the graves of two 18th century figures St Louis Marie Grignion de Montfort, whose writings on Mary had a considerable effect on him at the time of his decision to study clandestinely for the priesthood during the Nazi occupation of Poland and Blessed Marie Louise de Jesus, founder of the Daughters of Wisdom.
Tomorrow, he will move to Brittany's most famous place of pilgrimage at St Anne d'Auray, where Saint Anne, Mary's mother and Christ's grandmother, is venerated 120,000 people are expected to greet him there.
On Saturday he returns to Tours in the Loire valley, where he will open the celebrations for the 1,600th anniversary of the death of Saint Martin, a Roman legionary who converted and became the evangelist of the rural areas of central France. He will also meet leaders of the French Protestant and Orthodox Churches.
The most controversial part of his visit will be on Sunday at Reims. There, 150,000 Catholics are expected to attend Mass to mark the anniversary of Clovis's baptism at an air base outside the town. On Sunday evening the Prime Minister, Mr Alain Juppe will bid the Pope farewell on his departure for Rome.
The Pope's attendance at the Clovis celebrations is controversial because left wing and anticlerical opinion believes it is an intrusion by the Catholic Church into France's proud republican and secular traditions.
These sectors see the Pope's visit as part of a crusade to revive France's other tradition, as the "eldest daughter of the church", the oldest Christian and Catholic state in Europe after Rome. They accuse President Chirac of violating the French constitution's secular principles by greeting the Pope on his arrival.
But a campaign by some leftwingers for Catholics to "unbaptise" themselves by removing their names from parish birth registers in protest at the visit has won little support, with only 400 people in the whole country requesting their names to be erased.
The Archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Jean Marie Lustiger, himself tipped as a possible papal candidate, has accused left wing intellectuals of "waging an ideological war" against the church. "The fuss about the Pope's visit shocks me as it smacks of fanaticism and intolerance."
The church has moved to distance itself from the far right National Front leader, Mr JeanMarie Le Pen, who has tried to claim Clovis for his own brand of xenophobia French nationalism. On Tuesday it condemned his remarks that some races and civilisations, notably the French, are superior to others.
Mr Le Pen has said he hopes to attend the Pope's Mass in Reims, although the church insists he has not been invited and would not be admitted to the VIP enclosure.
Militant secularists plan a counter demonstration to the Reims celebrations on Sunday. Police do not expect trouble in Paris, but they are making contingency plans for possible attempts by small groups of activists to disrupt the papal ceremonies in Tours, Brittany and Reims.