Hollande sees common ground with pope on global issues
Vatican City (AFP) - President Francois Hollande spoke of "convergence" on international issues after talks with Pope Francis Friday amid a swirling scandal over the French leader's love life and divisions in France over hot-button issues like abortion and euthanasia.
An embattled Hollande shook hands with a glum-looking Francis at the start of the private audience, after which the Vatican said the two had discussed "constructive cooperation for the common good".
"Family, bioethics and the respect of religious communities" were among the issues addressed, the Vatican said in a statement.
Hollande, who hailed the pope's "radiant personality", said there had been "convergence on the big international issues."
The 59-year-old said he and Francis had the "same concern" about the status of Christian minorities in the Middle East, and the risk of an interreligious conflict in the Central African Republic.
The Vatican said Hollande and Francis had also discussed international issues including poverty, development, immigration and the environment.
Hollande said he had asked the pope for the Vatican to receive Syria's main opposition coalition, as the first talks between Syria's warring sides in Switzerland on Friday got off to a rough start.
"The Geneva II conference should be aimed at transition. We need to do everything to stop the fighting and dispatch humanitarian aid," Hollande said.
Hollande has previously said that the pope, a "great moral authority", could help "find a political solution" to Syria's devastating civil war.
After the talks, an emotional pontiff warmly clasped hands with freed French priest Georges Vandenbeusch, who was held hostage in Cameroon in November and travelled to the Vatican with Hollande.
Security measures for Hollande's visit were stepped up following the explosion just hours before of a small bomb packed with nails and lead pellets, which damaged cars and smashed windows near a French church in Rome.
Police bomb disposal experts were called out again later on Friday after receiving an anonymous phone call about a device placed under the famous colonnade on St Peter's Square, which turned out to be a false alarm.
Hollande's visit has been overshadowed by the fall-out from revelations of a two-year tryst with 41-year-old actress Julie Gayet.
His official partner, Valerie Trierweiler -- for whom he left fellow Socialist politician Segolene Royal, the mother of his four children -- has spent the week holed up in a presidential residence in Versailles near Paris.
Critics say Hollande's colourful love life has distracted him from tackling pressing national issues such as the economic crisis.
'Difficult time in his private life'
Plagued by low popularity, the French president hopes to reconcile with a Catholic electorate largely hostile to his policies.
Hollande sees the visit as a chance to send "a strong message of dialogue and attention to Catholics", an advisor said at a briefing ahead of the trip.
But he admitted: "Hollande's trip has clearly come at a difficult time in his private life".
Hollande may be hoping some of the pope's popularity rubs off on him.
His diplomatic overture will be made no easier by lawmakers' decision this week to greenlight a change in the country's abortion laws, effectively making it easier for a woman to terminate a pregnancy.
Anger among staunch Catholics has also been fuelled by plans for the legalisation of assisted suicide -- with French bishops speaking out to condemn a topic Hollande promised to support in his electoral campaign.
Relations between part of the electorate and the government soured notably last year when France legalised gay weddings, despite hundreds of thousands of people taking to the streets to hold huge protests.
Some 110,000 frustrated Catholics have signed a petition calling on the congenial Francis to get tough and raise their concerns with Hollande.
Although the pope, 77, has called for "mercy" toward gays, divorced people and women who have abortions, Vatican experts say Francis is a conservative at heart.
He has denounced abortions as a "frightful" symptom of today's "throw-away culture", and on Wednesday he tweeted his support for US Catholics taking part in the annual anti-abortion "March for Life" in Washington.
