The Holy Father is nothing if not peripatetic. Three weeks after the papal visit to Mongolia, he faces a very different challenge with a visit to Marseilles – the first pope to do so since Clement VII in rather less happy circumstances in 1533. It is part of his continuing “Mediterranean meetings”, whereby he has visited various cities around the Mediterranean, to remind us that the sea is a place of encounter and dialogue as well as conflict. Europeans now tend to see it in terms of the numbers of desperate migrants crossing it to escape poverty and conflict in their home countries.