French Socialists Chastise Pope on Abortion Issue

PARIS — France’s governing Socialist Party delivered a stinging admonition to Pope John Paul II on Friday, officially “regretting” the visiting pontiff’s decision to pray at the grave of a prominent antiabortion crusader.

“The meaning of such a gesture can only cause discontent and risks encouraging in our country the determination of those who wage a struggle bearing the mark of intolerance,” the party of Prime Minister Lionel Jospin said in a statement.

The extraordinary rebuke was issued a few hours before John Paul, here for the four-day World Youth Days festival that has drawn more than half a million Roman Catholic pilgrims, was expected to travel by helicopter to the tomb of French geneticist Jerome Lejeune in Chalo-Saint-Mars, 40 miles southeast of Paris.

Vatican authorities described the visit to the grave of Lejeune, a friend and intellectual soul mate of the pope, as private. The cemetery was surrounded by about 400 French anti-terrorist forces who kept out onlookers and reporters.

Lejeune was the founder of Let Them Live, an antiabortion group, and had just been appointed by John Paul to a top Vatican post when he died in April 1994.

Lejeune was renowned in scientific circles around the world for his discovery of the chromosome that causes Down’s syndrome. In part because of his research, many women choose to end their pregnancies when tests show evidence of the congenital condition in the fetus.

The Socialist Party statement said that the French right to abortion, in place since 1975, should be respected, and it condemned protests at a Paris hospital by antiabortion groups during the World Youth Days events this week.

The Socialist Party joined other abortion rights advocates who had singled out this item on the pope’s agenda for criticism.

“The pope is reopening the debate over abortion that once tore this country apart and that no one wants to revive,” Yvette Roudy, a Socialist former minister of women’s rights, declared before the pontiff arrived Thursday. “The pope is welcome in France as long as he doesn’t meddle in the internal affairs of the republic,” she said.

French trade unionists, protesting the pope’s opposition to artificial contraception, handed out 10,000 free condoms to passersby and young Catholic pilgrims in Paris.