PARIS (Reuters) - It’s sunset in the French capital, and hundreds of hungry people are poised to begin their meals at the sounding of a Muslim call to prayer.

Elsewhere in the world, the call rings forth from the minarets of mosques, but inside a tent in a gritty part of north Paris, it comes from a tinny radio speaker.

For the holy month of Ramadan, a soup kitchen has opened outside Cite Edmond Michelet, a tough public housing project in Paris’ notorious 19th arrondissement. On the menu is a traditional dinner, starting with yoghurt and dates.

I heard a lot more stories that could fit into this feature on the Ramadan soup kitchen in Paris (click here). One thing that was surprising was how many people there said they had professions and jobs and so didn’t really need the free meal. I met an architect, a waiter, a hairdresser, a construction worker — lots of people claimed they were working, or had come to France to work.

Some said they were at the soup kitchen for its community feel and chaleur (warmth), others because they loved the soup. One fellow said “It tastes exactly like mom used to make” but since she lives so far away in the suburbs, he can’t visit her often. He even brought a thermos to take some soup home.

It took us a while to get any images as people were quite camera shy. A volunteer told me that many might fear being on television because they had invented stories of successful lives in Paris and didn’t want to risk having relatives see them accepting charity.

The arch-traditionalist Fraternity of Saint Pius X, which broke with Rome two decades ago and saw its bishops excommunicated, hopes Pope Benedict’s visit to Lourdes this weekend will inspire him to roll back the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. The SSPX rejects the Council’s opening to other religions and upholds strict adherence to Catholic traditions such as the old Latin Mass. It was encouraged when Pope Benedict allowed wider use of the Tridentine liturgy last year. But in recent talks on possibly reentering the Roman fold, it once again baulked at accepting the authority of a pope who defends the 1962-1965 Council. Many ailing Catholics turn to Lourdes as their last hope for healing after all else fails. Is this a sign the SSPX might see Lourdes as its last hope too?

Rev. Régis de Cacqueray Valmenier, superior of the SSPX’s district in France, stressed in a communique that the breakaway Catholic group welcomed his visit and maintained an“unswerving attachment to the Apostolic See.”

But the rest of his statement made clear it was still at odds with Benedict:

“Let us pray the rosary to the Very Holy Virgin Mary so that the successor of Peter, in this terribly difficult epoch when he must govern the Church, may find at Lourdes the lucidity and the strength to recognise, denounce and extirpate the Council’s errors which are essentially the origin of the crisis in the Church.

“Let us pray that the Catholic faith, outside of which nobody can be saved, shall return to the souls and that Christ the King may reign again over countries and societies.”

SSPX leader Bishop Bernard Fellay basically rejected an ultimatum the Vatican gave it last June to accept papal authority if the fraternity wanted to come back into the Roman fold. In his latest sermon posted on the SSPX website, he argued that he didn’t actually reject any proposals from Rome because there weren’t any serious proposals presented. The Vatican clearly thought they were serious proposals, though, so Fellay seems to be trying to redefine the five points presented to him in order to sideline them without saying so. The rest of the sermon repeated the fraternity’s long-standing position that the Vatican should give in on the Council issue, not the SSPX.

Rev. Alain Lorans, the SSPX spokesman in Paris, confirmed that nothing had changed between the fraternity and the Vatican over the summer. He also denied rumours in Paris that SSPX priests would attend the pope’s open-air Mass on Saturday, which would cause quite a stir in Catholic circles here. Admission is open to the Mass on the Esplanade des Invalides, so they could attend it without an invitation.

But the SSPX will mark the pope’s presence with symbolic acts at its main church in Paris, which is close to the Collège des Bernardins where Benedict will address intellectuals. The pope is due to pass it in his popemobile after the speech, on his way to vespers at Notre Dame Cathedral. “Since the pope will pass close by Saint Nicolas du Chardonnet, the church is decked out in the Vatican colours white and yellow. And when the pope passes by the church, the bells will toll,” Lorans said.

During a Vatican briefing this week on Pope Benedict’s trip to France, a television producer got up and asked the question that surely was foremost in the minds of many photographers and television crews struggling to hold back yawns as subjects such as France’s secular history were discussed:

Will Carla Bruni be at the airport to welcome the pope?

Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi smiled. He said Carla Bruni’s husband — who happens to be Nicolas Sarkozy, the president of France – had made it known that he might be at the airport. But he said he did not know if Bruni would be there. Heads of state usually wait for popes at their palaces but sometimes, to show their added respect for the pontiff, they also go to the airport.

In Paris, government officials confirmed Sarkozy would break protocol and greet Benedict at Orly airport, something he is not required to do because this is an official visit rather than a more formal state visit. They said they expected Carla to be there … but didn’t want to be quoted on that.

It seems wherever Sarkozy goes these days,  the visual media is less interested in him than in his current wife, the fomer Carla Bruni. The Italian-born singer, song writer and former supermodel who has been the darling of the media since she entered Sarkozy’s life late last year. Bruni, 40, married Sarkozy in February after a whirlwind three-month romance that started one month after Sarkozy, 53, divorced his second wife, Cecilia.

Carla, who has said she sees herself as being akin to the late U.S. first lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, was not married to Sarkozy when he last saw the pope in Rome in December, so she did not — to the disappointment of the media — accompany him. Sarkozy considers himself a “cultural Catholic” and attends mass only occasionally. Under Church law he is not allowed to take communion since he has not received annulments from his previous marriages.

The pope’s trip to Paris and Lourdes begins on Friday and the media surely will have more weighty political and religious subjects to consider. But for the visual media at least, the moment to die for– whether it takes place at the airport or the Elysée Palace or in Notre Dame Cathedral– will be that of Carla and the pope.

France wouldn’t be France if it didn’t satirise the high and mighty — especially when the target is none other than head of the Roman Catholic Church which once held so much power here.

With Pope Benedict due to arrive on Friday for his first official visit, the French satirical press is having a field day poking fun at him, Catholics, Church doctrine and anything else to do with religion. Being militantly anti-Catholic is a badge of honour for a certain type of secularist French intellectual, so this week’s editions of their favourite journals were bound to zero in on Benedict. But there’s an interesting twist…

Le Canard enchaîné (picture above), a weekly that mixes satire and investigative journalism, something like Private Eye in Britain, leads its front page with a spoof story claiming Benedict (Benoît XVI in French) has been listed in a controversial classified police registry dubbed Edvige. Pretty tame stuff. Its main scoop — the Canard is a must-read for Parisian political gossip — is the claim that President Nicolas Sarkozy wanted to attend just about every important event during Benedict’s stay in France. Like many other anonymously sourced Canard scoops, this may or may not be true. Sounds likely, though…

The other satirical weekly, Charlie Hebdo, loves to provoke with much cruder fare. This is the magazine that reprinted the Danish caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad and was taken to court by French Muslims for defamation (it won easily, because free speech was bound to trump the Muslims’ charges of blasphemy in court). This week’s Numéro Spécial Pape (Special Pope Edition) won’t disappoint its readers. It has a long editorial denouncing the Church, cartoons satirising Sarkozy for speaking positively about religion and a list of planned anti-pope petitions and protests (all a safe distance from any papal events). There are also pages of polemical cartoons, some of them downright pornographic and insulting. The cover (at right) was the tamest of them all.

The most interesting aspect of this criticism, though, is what the French like to call the “non-dit” — the “unsaid”. There is much less snide criticism in the media now than there used to be. Just before the 1997 World Youth Day (WYD) in Paris, the media poured cold water on the idea and made fun of the Catholic Church and the ailing Pope John Paul. Commentators announced in advance that it would be a flop. In the end, it was a stunning success. The final Mass at Longchamp racetrack drew over a million Catholics, twice as many as expected.

“There was a change with the 1997 WYD. Catholics were proud to turn out in numbers,” explained Frédéric Lenoir, editor-in-chief of the bimonthly Le Monde des Religions. “All of a sudden, that gave the media — and French society in general — the feeling that religion was important now and one had to reckon with it. Contrary to what the sociologists had been saying for years, it wasn’t a phenomenon that was disappearing. To the contrary, it was a phenomenon that had never disappeared, it had just gone underground a bit.”

One and a half million euros ($2.1 million) for 24 hours in Paris? No, we’re not talking about some luxury visit, but the stopover that Pope Benedict will make on Friday and Saturday on his way to the shrine at Lourdes. The pontiff apparently did not even plan to visit the capital on his first trip to France, meant to mark the 150th anniversary of the apparitions of the Virgin Mary there. But the city’s archbishop, Cardinal André Vingt-Trois, argued for a stop in the City of Light and Benedict agreed.

The Archdiocese of Paris has offered an interesting peek into the costs of a papal visit as part of a public appeal it made to Catholics to help foot the bill. The archdiocese expects to cover all costs without having to dip into its own funds. At a media briefing on Monday, it presented pie-charts (which the French call “camemberts”) breaking down projected expenditure and income. The costs for security, which must be considerable, are assumed by the state and not included in these totals.

On the cost side, the largest chunk of the 1.5 million euro budget — 52% — will go for 15 giant screens that will be set up along the left bank of the River Seine on Friday to show live broadcasts of the pope’s activities during the day. They will then be switched to the Espalanade des Invalides, a spacious green in western Paris, to transmit his Mass to the crowd of 200,000 expected there on Saturday morning.

The costs of the different liturgical celebrations — including new vestments and other equipment for the vespers in Notre Dame and the open-air Mass — will take up another 19% and logistical costs another 11%. Nine percent will go for the media centre at the Ecole Militaire and the final three percent for organisational costs.

What about those high Paris hotel prices? No problem — he’ll stay at the nunciature (Vatican embassy).

The faithful are expected to foot 72% of this bill in one way or another. Individual donations are due to cover 52% of the costs and the collection at the Mass should bring in another 20%. Private patrons shuld pay 15% of the total and commercial sponsors 10%. The last three percent should come from sales of souvenirs like the T-shirts advertised on the archdiocese’s website.

Some “firsts” take place amid crowds and television cameras, others happen more quietly. The Grand Mosque of Paris chose the low-key approach when it received Cardinal André Vingt-Trois on Wednesday evening for an iftar dinner. It was the first that a Roman Catholic archbishop of the French capital had visited its leading mosque for the traditional meal breaking the Ramadan fast. After a short prayer by an imam and introductory remarks, they sat down to an North African-style dinner of spicy chorba (soup), chicken and olives and dessert of honey pastries and mint tea.

France is home to Europe’s largest Muslim minority, about five million, and interfaith contacts often depend on the personalities involved, especially at the local level. Pope Benedict will meet a delegation of French Muslims — some national leaders such as the cardinal’s host, Paris Grand Mosque Rector Dalil Boubakeur, and some local leaders active in Christian-Muslim dialogue — when he visits Paris next week.

Boubakeur thanked Vingt-Trois for the support the Church had given its “immigrant brothers” over the years, especially help to integrate young Muslims. In one such project, the Catholic Institute of Paris offers courses on French politics, law and secularism for future imams studying Islamic theology at the Grand Mosque.

“It’s an honour for me, who has frequently walked past the walls of the Grand Mosque of Paris, the most important in France, to have an occasion to enter and share an important moment in the life of your community,” said the cardinal, a Parisian who grew up in the city’s fifth arrondissement where the mosque is located.

“Even if our paths to receive revelation and respond to the call of God are different, we are invited to have a common attitude of faith,” he said. “In many regions of France, the witness manifested by the faith of Muslims is something that helps Christians ask themselves about their faith and the way they live it.”

One of the largest medieval buildings in Paris reopens this week as a forum for discussion about faith in the modern world after more than two centuries being used mostly as a fire station and police training centre. The Collège des Bernardins was founded in 1247 by the English Cistercian monk Stephen of Lexington as a residential college for the order’s monks. After the French Revolution, it was taken over by the city.

The Roman Catholic archdiocese of Paris bought the building and spent five years renovating it to house its theology school and host debates, conferences, art exhibitions and evenings of film and music. Its first major event will be a speech on faith and culture by Pope Benedict, who will address an audience of 700 personalities from the world of French culture on the first day of his Sept. 12-15 visit to France.

The college, whose name comes from its original designation as St. Bernard’s College, stands on the Left Bank just off the Boulevard Saint Germain. The five-year restoration highlighted the building’s simple Gothic architecture while adding modern comforts such as heating, air conditioning and WiFi (see video). The college aims “to serve mankind in all its dimensions — its emotions, its intelligence, its liberty, its relations and its faith”.

The city’s archbishop, Cardinal Andre Vingt-Trois, told journalists during a pre-opening media tour that the Catholic Church needed to promote discussion with modern society. “Our Christian faith, our Christian tradition and wisdom are today immersed in a pluri-religious and pluri-cultural society. Despite the generous and multiple forms of religion on offer, many of our contemporaries do not belong to a specific religion, or have no religion or belief at all.” The discussions will bring together Catholics and non-Catholics, believers and non-believers, to discuss issues including culture, economics, international development and Christian-Jewish relations. Another issue will be the effects of scientific progress on society and questions of bioethics, he said. “How will human identity — what it means to be a man or a woman — be respected and promoted? Will it be reduced to the roll of a tool for the well-being of a few?

“All these questions face us. We don’t all have the same answer. We don’t always have an answer. But we are all confronted with these questions and we cannot avoid them, unless we consider human history to be a fate that mankind cannot change. That is not our conviction.”

The college is the largest civil building in Paris dating from the Middle Ages. Only Notre Dame Cathedral and a few other major medieval churches are larger, said Hervé Baptiste, the Culture Ministry’s chief architect for historical monuments. Thanks to its monument status, the Culture Ministry, Paris City Hall and the Ile-de-France region around Paris contributed 14.5 million euros of the college’s 50-million-euro renovation bill. The rest was financed by contributions from companies and individuals as well as bank loans guaranteed by rents the archdiocese receives from its real estate holdings in the French capital.

Culture Minister Christine Albanel, Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoe and Ile-de-France Region President Jean-Paul Huchon will join Cardinal Vingt-Trois in inaugurating the college on Thursday.