Pope Leo XIV touched down at Orly airport on Friday morning to begin a four-day pilgrimage across France, a journey that will test the fragile concordat between the Republic’s strict secularism and a Church sensing an unexpected stirring of faith. The centrepiece arrives on Saturday, when an altar raised on the Place de la Concorde will host a Mass expected to draw more than half a million faithful along the Champs-Élysées, stretching toward the Arc de Triomphe in a spectacle not witnessed in the capital for decades.
A visit shaped by laïcité and politics
President Emmanuel Macron welcomed the pontiff on the tarmac before the two men retreated to the Élysée Palace for talks ranging from the wars in Ukraine and Gaza to the ethics of artificial intelligence. Yet the president will be conspicuously absent from the liturgies that define the trip. France’s 1905 law on the separation of church and state compels a studied distance; Macron will not attend the Concorde Mass, nor the gatherings at Notre-Dame, Stade de France, or Lourdes. His wife, Brigitte, and Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu will represent the government instead.
The guest list for Saturday’s celebration reads like a preview of the 2027 presidential contest. Marine Le Pen, Édouard Philippe, Gabriel Attal and Bruno Retailleau are all expected. Their presence underscores the Catholic electorate’s enduring weight, even in a nation where fewer than five per cent of the population now attends Mass weekly.
Tensions behind the ceremonial veil
Diplomatic friction surfaced in the weeks before the visit. Reports suggested Macron had pressed for a more pageant-heavy programme — a cavalry escort down the Champs-Élysées, a meeting with the artisans who restored Notre-Dame after the 2019 fire — only to be rebuffed by a Vatican delegation protective of the Pope’s pastoral focus. Élysée officials later downplayed the discord, insisting such offers are standard protocol for a visiting head of state and that the Pope’s packed schedule simply left no room for the Notre-Dame encounter.
The Pope’s own itinerary tells its own story. Friday afternoon brings a Popemobile procession to the cathedral, still bearing the scars of the blaze. Evening falls at the Stade de France, where 80,000 young people await a vigil. Sunday shifts the scene to the Pyrenean sanctuary of Lourdes, where 150,000 have registered for Mass. Monday concludes in Metz, the eastern city where Robert Schuman — architect of European unity and now a candidate for beatification — lies buried.
A pontiff with French roots
Leo XIV, born Robert Prevost in Chicago in 1955, carries a quiet French lineage. His paternal grandmother, born in Le Havre in 1894, brought the name Prevost — her mother’s maiden name — into the family upon marriage to an Italian immigrant. The connection lends a personal texture to a visit already heavy with symbolism: the first American pope, standing on the soil of the Church’s self-styled “Eldest Daughter,” a title rooted in Clovis’s baptism but historically contested by Armenia, Georgia and Ethiopia.
History weighs on every stop. The Avignon papacy of the 14th century. Napoleon’s imprisonment of two pontiffs. The 1905 rupture. John Paul II’s repeated embraces of French crowds. Francis’s deliberate avoidance of Paris, preferring Strasbourg, Marseille and Corsica. Leo XIV now writes his own chapter.
The quiet resurgence
Beneath the headlines, the numbers tell a paradox. Regular worship has collapsed from 35 per cent in 1960 to under five per cent today. The priesthood has shrivelled by two-thirds since 1990, leaving fewer than 9,000 priests to serve a country of 68 million. Yet adult baptisms have more than doubled in five years, reaching 10,000 in 2025.
“France has indeed secularised, but there is a void where God and values used to be,” Cardinal François Bustillo, Bishop of Ajaccio, told me this week. “People are searching for something. Maybe they go to India or Tibet or the Amazon. And now the Pope comes here from Rome, bringing a reminder to people of their own roots. It was John Paul II who awoke the East. Now Leo XIV will awake the West.”
The Pope will also meet migrants in Paris and survivors of clerical abuse in Lourdes — encounters that will draw less television coverage but carry immense moral weight for a Church still reckoning with its wounds.
Why it Matters
This visit is not merely a diplomatic courtesy or a nostalgic pageant. It is a stress test for French laïcité at a moment when the Republic’s founding compact is strained by identity politics, religious pluralism and a palpable spiritual hunger that defies the secularisation thesis. The hundreds of thousands expected on the Champs-Élysées — many young, many converts — signal a Church that, while diminished in institutional power, retains a unique capacity to mobilise. For Macron, the optics of sharing a stage with the Pope in Metz but absenting himself from the Mass speak to a political class still uneasy with faith’s public return. For the Pope, the trip offers a chance to define his European papacy not in the corridors of Brussels but on the soil where the European project was dreamed by a saint-in-waiting named Schuman. Whether the “awakening” Cardinal Bustillo predicts takes root or fades into another cultural moment will shape the religious landscape of the West for a generation.
