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ROME: Is the Roman Catholic Church a beleaguered underdog, fighting for a voice in secular Europe, or a still-mighty power, wielding its influence on European law through friendly center-right governments?

That question, which has been building throughout Pope Benedict XVI’s three-year-old papacy, came to the fore in his recent trip to France.

Yet even as the pope called for more animated discussion of church and state and more interreligious dialogue, no one, probably not even at the Vatican, expects Europe to become newly devout anytime soon. Mass attendance is at record lows, as is the number of priests.

And no one expects France to overturn its dearly held tenet of laïcité, or strict separation of church and state, despite the pope’s admonition that secularism leads to nihilism and President Nicolas Sarkozy’s calls for a more “positive laïcité.”

But Benedict’s insistence that religion and politics be “open” to each other – coupled with his strong renewal while in Lourdes of the church’s opposition to same-sex couples, communion for the divorced and euthanasia – sends a direct message: The church doesn’t want European law to be at odds with church teaching, and he wants Roman Catholics to make some noise about it.

This pope is looking to reconquer Europe, if not in numbers, then at the political table.

“Let’s not make mistakes, there are laws in Europe that the Vatican would like to change,” said John Allen Jr., a columnist for the National Catholic Reporter in the United States. Benedict’s remarks in France were “not an apolitical reflection,” he said.

The Vatican, Allen added, is concerned about “a progressive secularization of European institutions” that is “heavily influenced by the French model.”

For one, European Union legislation forbids discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. In a continuing clash in Britain, Roman Catholic orphanages have said they will have to shut down or break ties with the church if they are required to place orphans with same-sex couples. Spain legalized same-sex marriage in 2005, following the Netherlands and Belgium.

Some say the pope’s visit might encourage Roman Catholics to speak up in opposition.

The pope’s reception in France was “encouraging,” the Reverend Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman, said in an interview in the past week. The climate in France, he said, indicated that “the church has a contribution to make and it’s accepted and respected as a cultural and moral force, a force of moral commitment.”

Benedict ostensibly traveled to France for the 150th anniversary of the year a 14-year-old peasant girl, Bernadette Soubirous, said she had visions of the Virgin Mary in a Lourdes grotto that this year is expected to draw a record eight million pilgrims.

Lourdes always has epitomized “a kind of Catholic counterculture” and “the power of faith over science,” said Ruth Harris, a professor of modern history at Oxford who is the author of “Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age.” Over the years, she said, the city’s popularity “gets strengthened in these periods where the republic is seen as persecuting the church.”

That may be the case today, when some devout Roman Catholics in Europe see themselves as a persecuted minority facing a secular hegemony.

Sociologically, “I think papal trips perform the same function as gay pride parades,” Allen said. “It’s about a group that perceives itself as a minority that has been in their view closeted for too long and wants to take it to the streets and proclaim that ‘We’re here.”‘

In Paris, an estimated quarter-million people turned out to hear the pope celebrate Mass at the Esplanade des Invalides, about the same or slightly more than greeted Barack Obama in his visit to Berlin in July before he became the U.S. Democratic presidential candidate, though half the number at the Paris gay pride parade in June. Thousands of young people waited for hours to hear the pope’s address in the Cathedral of Notre-Dame.

In today’s Europe, many Roman Catholics “feel the need for public manifestations of who they are because they can’t rely on the institutions of the culture to transmit it,” Allen said.

That strategy has not convinced critics. Claiming victim status “is a classic move, a deft rhetorical move,” said Paolo Flores d’Arcais, editor of a left-wing Italian journal, MicroMega, who argued for atheism in a public debate against Benedict, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, in 2000.

Some see the church as not unlike American conservatives, who continue to depict themselves as outsiders fighting a dominant liberal culture even after eight years of a Republican executive.

France, Germany and Italy are governed by church-friendly center-right coalitions. Last spring, the right made unprecedented challenges to Italy’s 30-year-old law legalizing abortion. In 2005, Italy passed a law restricting artificial insemination.

“So how can you say that you’re an oppressed minority?” Flores asked. “That’s madness.”

Today, Europe is defined largely in economic, not cultural, terms. It is uncertain about its identity, its shared values, its future. Will the pope’s visit change the conversation?

“I don’t think it’ll change because the pope spoke,” said Mario Marazziti, a spokesman for the Community of Sant’Egidio, a lay Roman Catholic group based in Rome. But Benedict clearly has his sights on Europe. “It’s interesting,” Marazziti said. “The two don’t understand each other, but they talk to one another.”