Church bells rang across France on Friday as Pope Leo XIV landed at Orly airport, opening the country’s first official papal visit in 18 years. President Emmanuel Macron greeted him on arrival, and by Saturday roughly 800,000 people had gathered for an open-air.
Mass on the Champs-Élysées. Those numbers sit awkwardly in a republic that prides itself on keeping religion out of state business. Over four days, Leo has tested how much room that republic leaves for a church unwilling to soften its doctrine.
Leo Presses Doctrine on a Secular State
Leo told Macron at the Élysée Palace: “True secularism does not consist in excluding religion from the public space.” He then condemned the assisted dying bill that lawmakers recently approved, along with surrogacy and abortion, which France wrote into its constitution in 2024. On artificial intelligence he found common ground, since Macron also insisted that human beings must keep their rightful place before digital power.
Secularists can reasonably object that a foreign head of state is lecturing a sovereign parliament. Yet laïcité, built on the 1905 law separating church and state, binds public institutions and does not gag citizens or clergy. France can reject his case through its parliament, but it cannot fairly demand his silence.
Large Crowds Meet a Shrinking Flock
The turnout looks striking against the demographics, since under a third of the French population identifies as Catholic and disaffiliation has risen over the past decade. The national statistics bureau also records a surge in adult baptisms, which points to curiosity as much as nostalgia. Crowds of that size, however, say little about how many of those present share his views on assisted dying or abortion.
That gives his message a political edge, because voters choose Macron’s successor next spring and the anti-immigration far right is seeking power. Leo has answered that polarised setting by urging dialogue rather than confrontation, while keeping his positions on life issues firmly Catholic.
That approach can be read as a mature alternative to culture war, though critics will see a church demanding a hearing whilst rejecting the verdict of lawmakers.
Abuse Survivors Test the Church’s Authority
The Church’s record complicates any claim to mediate, since an independent commission estimated in 2021 that 330,000 children were abused by clergy and lay workers over seven decades. On Sunday, Leo met seven survivors at Lourdes for two hours and pledged action. Véronique Garnier, one of them, said she found the Mass troubling because he referred to abuse without directly apologising, though she left the meeting encouraged.
Acknowledgment beats silence, and the Lourdes meeting deserves credit for at least that much. Dialogue is easier to demand from political opponents than from victims of one’s own institution.
Yet he is asking a secular republic to make room for Catholic argument whilst some survivors still want stronger accountability from the institution he leads.
A church that wants France to listen will earn that hearing by acting on what survivors have already told it.
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