The mass demonstrations, typically ignored in the rest of international news, attracted the attention of the French Interior Minister, Manuel Valls, who compared the Catholics well represented in the demonstrations, with Muslim fundamentalists, from the Tablet.
Mr Valls, who ten days ago accompanied President François Hollande to the Vatican, told fellow Socialist lawmakers that “extreme right-wing Catholics” opposed gay marriage, legalised last year, and current plans to make access to abortion easier.
This Catholic far Right, which he did not define more clearly, had found allies among political conservatives, he said in an apparent reference to the hundreds of thousands who marched against same-sex marriage last year.
“We must wage combat because there is a danger,” he told the meeting reviewing the current state of France’s trademark secular system of laïcité.German news reports "tens of thousands" of protesters in the streets.
