Pope Leo XIV’s apostolic journey to France, from 25 to 28 September 2026, was the first full papal state visit since Benedict XVI in September 2008. Pope Francis had been to Strasbourg, Marseille, and Ajaccio, but none of those trips was constituted as an official state visit. Leo’s was. It ran through Paris and Saint-Denis, the Marian shrine at Lourdes, and the border city of Metz, and it landed in a country that still calls itself, in an old papal phrase, the eldest daughter of the Church, while governing itself under laïcité, the legal and cultural separation of religion from the state that has shaped French public life since the 1905 law.

The scale of the crowds was the fact that cut through the argument. In a republic where fewer than half the population now identifies as Catholic, and where regular Sunday practice is a small minority, the Vatican and French authorities put the open-air Mass on the Place de la Concorde and the Champs-Élysées at roughly 700,000 to 800,000 people. Advance registration had been about 600,000. The surplus was people who came anyway. Across four days, coverage put total participation above a million. That does not reverse a century of secularization. It does show that Catholic practice in France is no longer only a story of empty naves.

 Arrival, the Élysée, and the argument over secularism

Leo, the first pope from the United States, landed at Orly on the morning of Friday 25 September. The program published by the Vatican in August had him with President Emmanuel Macron at the Élysée before any religious event. Macron’s welcome, as American Jesuit reporting described it, treated Catholicism largely as architecture, memory, and a humanist ethic. That framing was widely read as an attempt to reassure critics who saw a state visit by a pope as a strain on laïcité. Leo answered in the same room, and he did not accept the narrower reading.

True secularism, he said, does not consist in excluding religion from the public sphere or from education. It consists in the state and religious institutions talking to each other and working together for the common good. A Christian in public life, acting from a conscience formed by faith, is not thereby a proselytizer or a threat to national unity. Authentic secularism, in the line he repeated during the visit, “does not exclude religion but is capable of valuing it as an educational resource.” He closed by quoting Macron’s own 2018 words to the French bishops: a Church that claims no interest in temporal matters would not be fulfilling its vocation, and a president who claims no interest in the Church and in Catholics would be failing in his duty.

He also named policies. He warned against science and technology turned into profit-driven ventures involving genetic manipulation, surrogacy, trade in organs, or “the possibility of arranging one’s own death,” a direct reference to France’s recent move on assisted dying. He denounced abortion. He paired those criticisms with areas of agreement, including nuclear disarmament and human rights. On the republican triad he asked that liberty grow in concern for the common good, that fraternity embrace the whole human family, and that equality not erase differences between people. Journalists treated the formulations as diplomatic and pointed.

From the Élysée he went to UNESCO, whose headquarters sit in Paris. There he warned that the United Nations and other multilateral bodies were in crisis, and he returned to artificial intelligence and human dignity, themes he has carried since the start of his pontificate. The political half of the first day was therefore not ceremonial. It was an argument, conducted in public, about whether a secular state may treat religion as a private hobby or must reckon with it as a social fact.

 Notre-Dame and the stadium

In the afternoon he entered Notre-Dame for Vespers, the first pope to pray in the cathedral since the fire of 15 April 2019 and the reopening of December 2024. He told the clergy, religious, and seminarians gathered there that Notre-Dame is more than a monument. The collective effort to rebuild it, and the splendor of the result, showed that the heart of a people still beats there, at a place where past and future meet. He noted the odd contemporary arrangement of the building: visitors circulate all day, and when Mass is celebrated it is celebrated in the center while tourists move around it. In that, he said, the Church appears as what she is, a living organism, a believing community that gathers into its praise what culture and tradition have handed on.

The evening moved to the Stade de France in Saint-Denis, a commune in the northern suburbs whose name is itself a relic of early Christian Gaul and whose present population is heavily immigrant and, in large part, Muslim. About 80,000 young people had taken every available ticket. The vigil mixed prayer, fireworks, and a theatrical retelling of French Catholic history. Leo stayed until nearly 11 p.m. After a packed first day, aides and reporters noted that he seemed energized by the numbers rather than worn down by them. In later remarks he told the young that they are the Church today, and he praised their enthusiasm without treating it as a victory lap.

 The Mass on the Champs-Élysées

Saturday 26 September was the largest public event of the pontificate in France, and one of the largest religious gatherings in the country in decades. Leo began at the Maison Bakhita, an archdiocesan center for social support and for survivors of trafficking, then met catechumens and newly baptized adults at the Institut Catholique de Paris. He told them he was surprised by the number of recent converts, and he warned them, and the bishops’ synodal assembly working on the same phenomenon, not to become complacent or naively optimistic even while marveling at what was happening.

In the afternoon he rode an open popemobile the length of the Champs-Élysées, from the Arc de Triomphe toward the Place de la Concorde, a route of about two kilometers. Chants of “Leo, Leo” and “Vive le pape” ran down the avenue. White and yellow Vatican flags were the dominant color. The vehicle stopped often so he could bless children, babies passed forward by volunteers, and people with disabilities. Some in the crowd wore France football shirts printed “Pape Léon” with the number 14, a joke on Leo XIV. Entrances to the square were blocked hours before the 3 p.m. Mass. The security zone shut central Paris from the Concorde to the Arc and beyond. About 14,500 police, gendarmes, soldiers, and firefighters were deployed. Roughly 2,400 priests and deacons and about 100 bishops concelebrated or assisted.

The attendance figures differ slightly by wire, which is normal for an unfenced boulevard. Reuters and several agencies, citing French authorities via the Vatican, reported about 800,000. The Guardian and some early copy put the Vatican estimate at 700,000, about 100,000 above registration. The Independent had the same 700,000 against 600,000 registered. The Los Angeles Times used 800,000, about 200,000 above registration. The honest summary is that something on the order of three quarters of a million people stood on the avenue and the square, and that the organizers had underestimated them.

The square itself carried the argument. The Place de la Concorde is where Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette were guillotined, a symbolic birthplace of the revolutionary republic that later separated itself from the Church. A papal altar there was, for critics of the visit, a provocation; for the diocese, a claim that the republic’s central space is not closed to worship. Macron did not attend. His absence was attributed to laïcité. Brigitte Macron was there, as were Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu, Marine Le Pen, other presidential hopefuls, and Bernard Arnault. Le Pen, leading polls for 2027, told Le Monde it was natural to hear a message of peace and that the French needed it. Asked about the pope’s defense of migrants, she said he was the pope, not a candidate, and the two should not be confused.

In the homily Leo urged Catholics to seek happiness in faith rather than in material goods, immediate gratification, and “the countless little idols that promise the Moon but leave our hearts empty.” He asked them not to keep faith to themselves. “Let it overflow, so that those you meet may be refreshed and their thirst satisfied,” he said, and he prayed that the living water of the Spirit might flow through France. Only God, he said, can fill the emptiness within. One man in the crowd, Étienne Fabre, told reporters the country had waited almost twenty years for a pope in Paris.

 Lourdes

Late Saturday he flew south-west to Lourdes, the shrine built on the 1858 apparitions to Bernadette Soubirous, and prayed that night at the Grotto of Massabielle. Sunday morning he met the French bishops in the Sainte-Bernadette auditorium, the hall where the bishops’ conference holds its plenaries, then celebrated Mass on the prairie before an estimated 150,000 people. National Catholic Register and Catholic News Service both used that figure. Shrine events over the stop were put near 200,000.

The Lourdes message was aimed at a French debate as much as at pilgrims. At a place that gives priority to the sick and disabled, he said frailty never diminishes dignity, and that no one is turned away for it. France had just moved to legalize assisted dying. The homily was the pastoral counterpart of the Élysée warning. On Sunday night he joined the torchlight rosary, the procession the shrine holds every evening from April to November. He walked behind the illuminated statue of Our Lady, candle in one hand and rosary in the other, and told the crowd he had come as “a pilgrim among pilgrims,” answering the call of Mary. The “Ave Maria” of Lourdes rose between the decades, and the square in front of the basilica became a field of raised candles. The light that guides, he said, is the light of hope, which does not abandon people in a life marked by trials.

To the bishops he was more institutional. France lives under a particular regime of laïcité, born of a turbulent history, now calmer, which must still allow the Church to carry out its mission. If that hard-won balance is gradually questioned, as he said is happening elsewhere in the West, the bishops should not resign themselves. He told them the Church’s word has its place in public debate. He also spoke of falling vocations, sexual abuse, and the end-of-life law. The times are ripe, he said, for many contemporaries to hear the Gospel, precisely because a world from which God has been relegated to private life has produced disillusion, polarization, and a retreat of fraternity.

 Metz, and the close

Monday 28 September was the European day. Metz, near the German and Luxembourg borders, last saw a pope when John Paul II came in 1988. Leo began at the Robert Schuman congress center with an interreligious meeting and a speech on the roots of Europe for peace and unity, invoking Schuman, the Lorraine founder of the European project, and the older idea of peace as tranquillitas ordinis, an order in which each person recognizes the dignity of others. He argued that Europe’s spiritual and moral heritage preceded its economic and political one. Macron and other European figures were present.

He then rode about two kilometers through the center. Local and Vatican figures for the cathedral Mass at Saint-Étienne clustered around 35,000 to 40,000 in and around the building, with a larger number in the streets and expectations beforehand above 60,000, many of them from neighboring countries. Macron, who had skipped the religious events in Paris, attended this last Mass and saw the pope off at the airport at Goin in the early evening. In his thanks, Leo named the president, the civil authorities, the bishops, and the volunteers in Paris, Lourdes, and Metz.

At the general audience on 30 September he gathered the trip around a single image: Notre-Dame restored. The climax in the capital, he said, was the Mass at the Concorde, where the assembly ran the length of the Champs-Élysées to the Arc de Triomphe and beyond. As the cathedral had been rebuilt, so the Church in France was being renewed, visible especially in the young and in the rise in baptisms. Lourdes, he said, had been a pilgrimage to ask Mary’s intercession not only for France.

 What the crowds do and do not prove

France remains a secular country on every standard measure. The New York Times, previewing the trip, noted that fewer than half of nearly 70 million people call themselves Catholic, and that only about 5 percent say they go to church regularly. Inherited Catholicism has collapsed across two generations. Rural parishes have been merged. Working-age priests are overstretched. The abuse crisis, documented in the Sauvé report, is still the background against which any papal visit is judged; Leo’s tour was explicitly an attempt to encourage Catholics after that shock, not to declare it closed.

The baptism figures are the counter-trend, and they are specific. Vatican News, citing the French bishops’ conference, reported 13,234 adult baptisms expected at Easter 2026, against 4,278 in 2022, more than a tripling in four years and a rise of 28 percent on 2025. Over ten years the number has more than tripled. The New York Times had earlier cited a rise from roughly 3,600 adult baptisms in 2021 to nearly 10,400 in 2024. America Magazine described a jump on the order of 400 percent since the pandemic in some briefings. A figure above 21,000 has also circulated in commentary; the bishops’ number used by Vatican News during the visit itself is the safer one. Leo told the new Catholics that this was happening inside a deeply secularized culture, and that their testimonies were evidence of grace rather than a statistic to be brandished.

The sociological reading offered by converts and by academics who spoke to Vatican News is that France is moving from an inherited Christianity to a chosen one. Where a parish once had a single adult baptism at the Easter Vigil, some now have dozens. A share of the catechumens are young, urban, and previously non-practicing; some come from Muslim families, including immigrants educated in Catholic schools in Africa who found France, on arrival, startlingly irreligious. Priests say the demand is already outrunning the number of clergy. None of this restores the Church of 1960. It does falsify the claim that the institution is only in managed decline.

The political class noticed. A New York Times piece after the visit observed that from the prime minister to five presidential candidates, much of the establishment sat in front of the temporary altar, a display of reverence unusual in a country that guards its secular identity. Even politicians who stayed away praised the visit. A founder of a left-leaning Catholic magazine told the paper that Catholicism had turned once more into a political matter in France. Gabriel Attal, a former prime minister and a contender for 2027, said the images of the pope with young people spoke to a need for communion. The National Catholic Register quoted a Parisian asking who else, in 2026, could gather 600,000 people and produce even a temporary sense of national unity.

 Muslims, the public square, and what was actually said

The claim that Muslims as a body feared the Church gaining ground is not what the institutional record shows. On 23 September, two days before the pope landed, the rector of the Grand Mosque of Paris, Chems-Eddine Hafiz, issued a communiqué welcoming Leo. It described the visit as a universal message of exchange, fraternity, and the search for peace, in a time of wars, fractures, and rising hatreds. It welcomed the place given to interreligious dialogue, especially the meeting planned for Metz, and said religions have a duty not to let their differences become impassable borders. To mark the arrival, the mosque devoted the sermon at Friday prayer on 25 September to the visit and asked affiliated mosques and imams across France to do the same. The sermon was to stress Muslim respect for Christians, the duty to honor a guest, and the shared history of the two faiths, including the Prophet’s reception of the Christians of Najran. That is the opposite of a fear campaign. It is a public bid to define the visit as an occasion for coexistence.

The sharper tension sits in French politics, not in the mosque’s communiqué. For years, parties of the right and far right have argued that immigration from majority-Muslim countries strains laïcité and French culture. Le Pen’s presence at the Mass, and her care to separate the pope’s migrant appeal from her own program, showed the ambivalence: Catholic symbolism is useful to a narrative of French roots, while papal teaching on asylum is not. Leo refused the culture-war script. America Magazine noted that he warned young Catholics against entrenching themselves in those wars even as far-right politicians describe Muslim immigration as an existential risk to secularism itself. He asked Europeans to welcome men and women fleeing war and persecution. At Saint-Denis, in a banlieue often cited in debates over Islam and the republic, he spent the evening with 80,000 young people rather than with a thesis about replacement.

There is a further irony, recorded by reporters who spoke to catechumens. A number of young French converts say they were drawn toward public faith in part by watching Muslim classmates pray and fast without embarrassment. In a country that taught several generations to treat religion as something to be hidden, the visible practice of a minority religion made Christian practice thinkable again. Some of those converts are themselves from Muslim families. The Church’s modest resurgence and France’s Muslim presence are therefore not only rivals for the same public square. In pastoral experience they are also, for a subset of the newly baptized, part of the same story.

What the visit did produce, on all sides, was a renewed argument about visibility. A Mass of several hundred thousand on the revolutionary square, a pope in Notre-Dame, football shirts with a papal name, politicians across the spectrum in the front rows: Catholicism looked, for four days, like a public fact rather than a heritage industry. Secularists who treat laïcité as the absence of religion from shared space found that reading contested by the pope and, more awkwardly, by the size of the crowd. Muslim institutions answered with a welcome and a sermon about equal dignity, not with a warning that the Church was gaining ground. The fear that does appear in the French debate is political: fear, on one side, that religion of any kind is re-entering the republic, and fear, on another, that Islam already has. Leo’s texts tried to answer both by defending a secularism that can value religion without owning it, and a Church that speaks in public without pretending to govern.

The lasting measure will not be the Champs-Élysées. It will be whether the baptism numbers hold, whether parishes can absorb the catechumens, and whether the abuse crisis continues to set the terms on which the institution is trusted. Leo himself, in Paris and again to the bishops at Lourdes, declined the language of triumph. The crowds showed that the eldest daughter is not only a memory. They did not show that she has recovered the house.

 References

Reuters. “Hundreds of thousands in Paris cheer Pope Leo in largest event of French tour.” 26 September 2026.

The Guardian. “Pope Leo celebrates open-air mass before 700,000 people in Paris.” 26 September 2026.

The Independent. “Pope Leo attracts 700,000 people as he parades through Paris before outdoor Mass.” 26 September 2026.

Los Angeles Times. “Pope Leo draws 800,000 people to Paris for open-air Mass.” 26 September 2026.

dpa International. “Leo XIV draws 800,000 to open-air Mass on Paris’ Place de la Concorde.” 26 September 2026.

The New York Times. “Leo XIV, Trying to Be Everyone’s Pope, Tours Secular France.” 25 September 2026.

The New York Times. Reporting on the political reception of the visit. 30 September 2026.

America Magazine. “Vatican Notebook: Pope Leo navigates tensions between secularism and Catholic history on France visit.” 25 September 2026.

America Magazine. “Vatican Notebook: Pope Leo addresses French conversion boom, warns against complacency.” 26 September 2026.

Vatican News. Program of the apostolic journey to France, August 2026; reports on catechumens and on Lourdes, 26–27 September 2026; general audience summary, 30 September 2026.

Holy See Press Office. Addresses and bulletins for the journey, 25–28 September 2026, including the Metz homily.

National Catholic Register. “‘This Is Only the Beginning’: Pope Leo’s Visit Electrifies France.” 28 September 2026. Lourdes Mass photographs and caption, 27 September 2026.

OSV News. “Pope Leo XIV leads thousands in candlelight rosary procession in Lourdes.” 27 September 2026.

Grande Mosquée de Paris. “Communiqué: La Grande Mosquée de Paris souhaite la bienvenue en France au pape Léon XIV.” 23 September 2026.

franceinfo. Coverage of the Metz day and departure. 28 September 2026.

RCF. Text of the address to the bishops of France at Lourdes. September 2026.