Pope Leo XIV opens a four-day visit to France this week carrying a message about the sanctity of human life, arriving in a country that has enshrined abortion in its constitution and just legalized assisted dying.
The American pope lands in Paris on September 25 for a trip the French bishops' conference has titled "That the world may have life." He will parade down the Champs-Elysées in his popemobile, celebrate Mass at the Place de la Concorde, speak at UNESCO headquarters, pray at the shrine of Lourdes, meet with clergy abuse survivors, and close the visit September 28 in the northern city of Metz at a European conference on peace. Organizers expect as many as one million people to see him across the four days, the Associated Press reported.
The backdrop could hardly be sharper. France's National Assembly in 2024 made abortion a constitutional right, the first country in the world to do so. More recently, the same legislature gave final approval to a bill allowing adults with incurable illnesses to receive lethal medication. Both moves run directly against Catholic teaching on the dignity of human life from conception to natural death, and Leo is expected to say so.
Cardinal Jean-Marc Aveline, president of the French bishops' conference, left little ambiguity about the trip's central theme. Breitbart reported his remarks framing the visit squarely around the question of life:
"We already know that the question of life and respect for life, not only from an ethical standpoint, but in many ways, is at the heart of the pope's message and aligns very closely with the message of the Gospel."
That is diplomatic language, but the substance is unmistakable. When a pope visits a country that just constitutionalized abortion and legalized assisted dying, and the trip motto is "That the world may have life," the message writes itself. France operates under a strict form of secularism rooted in a 1905 law separating church and state, and its political class has moved steadily in a direction the Vatican considers hostile to the most basic claims of human dignity.
Leo's own inaugural encyclical, "Magnificent Humanity," addressed safeguarding human dignity in the age of artificial intelligence. In it, he called for robust AI regulation and urged developers to slow down, a position that has put him at odds with the Trump administration, which has encouraged AI innovation so the United States can compete with and surpass China. Leo will carry that theme to UNESCO headquarters on the first day of his visit, speaking about AI, education, and art.
The Trump administration, for its part, has again announced its withdrawal from UNESCO as part of a broader retreat from international organizations. Leo's decision to speak there anyway underscores the distance between the Vatican's multilateral instincts and Washington's current posture, though both share a deep skepticism of the secular European project on questions of life.
The scale of public interest has surprised even Vatican insiders. Sister Nathalie Becquart, a top Vatican official from France, acknowledged the unexpected enthusiasm.
"I think nobody many months ago or a few months ago would have imagined" the level of interest. "But they see what happened in Spain."
In Spain earlier this year, Leo received a seven-minute standing ovation after addressing the Spanish Parliament in June. The perimeter for his main Mass at the Place de la Concorde has already been extended beyond 1.9 kilometers, roughly the length of the Champs-Elysées, to accommodate larger-than-expected crowds.
Leo has also moved to reshape Vatican operations since taking the chair of Peter, repealing salary cuts and reversing several Francis-era institutional plans. His willingness to break with his predecessor's administrative choices while maintaining continuity on doctrine has defined the early months of his papacy.
France's Catholic landscape offers its own complicated picture. More than 13,000 adults were baptized at Easter this year, and adult baptisms have more than tripled since 2016, per the French bishops' conference. Leo plans to meet with new adult converts in a special audience during the trip.
But traditionalist Catholic Christian Marquant offered a colder assessment of the numbers:
"The new phenomenon of adult baptisms is put into perspective; in fact, it represents only a very modest rebound."
He blames the broader secularizing crisis in the French church on the modernizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council. The raw numbers support skepticism about any Catholic revival narrative: France recorded 513,000 baptisms in 1980. By 2024, that figure had fallen to 186,000.
Leo's pilgrimage to Lourdes, one of Christianity's most-visited shrines, especially for the sick seeking healing, will unfold against a painful backdrop. The Vatican took the unusual step of announcing ahead of time that Leo would meet with seven survivors of clergy sexual abuse in France, including one adult victim.
An independent report released in 2021 estimated that 330,000 children had been abused over 70 years by approximately 3,000 priests and church workers in France. The French bishops subsequently established an independent compensation system that has recommended more than 20 million euros in payouts to date. The scale of the crisis, and the decades of institutional failure that enabled it, remains a defining wound for French Catholicism.
At Lourdes itself, the abuse scandal has taken a visible, physical form. The Notre Dame du Rosaire Basilica features a façade designed by Rev. Marko Rupnik, one of the Catholic Church's most famous mosaic artists, who is currently on trial in a Vatican court. More than two dozen women have accused Rupnik of psychological, spiritual, and sexual abuse dating back to the 1990s, including during the creation of his artworks. His case was allegedly covered up for three decades by his Jesuit superiors, and Pope Francis, himself a Jesuit, was suspected of having protected Rupnik before ordering a canonical trial in 2024 amid a media outcry.
Bishop Jean-Marc Micas of Lourdes responded by first turning off the nighttime illumination of the basilica façade in 2024, then ordering the decorated doors covered, and most recently ordering the façade mosaics covered entirely. His reasoning was straightforward: abuse victims who come to Lourdes for healing should not be forced to look at the work of their alleged abuser.
Laura Sgro, an attorney for five of Rupnik's accusers, welcomed the decision.
"It is impossible to separate the work of art from the abuse."
The Vatican's willingness to confront internal dissent under Leo, including the recent excommunication of six bishops who defied his authority, suggests a papacy unafraid of institutional conflict. Whether that resolve extends to fully reckoning with the Rupnik case and the broader abuse crisis will be tested in France.
Leo closes the trip September 28 in Metz, birthplace of Robert Schuman, one of the founding fathers of European integration. He will participate in an interfaith meeting and speak at a European conference on peace, a fitting bookend for a visit that opens at UNESCO and threads through questions of human dignity, technological disruption, and institutional accountability.
The last pope to visit Lourdes was John Paul II in 2004, on what turned out to be his final foreign trip. Ailing and gasping for air during Mass, John Paul delivered a forceful condemnation of abortion and euthanasia. Leo arrives in far better health and with a broader agenda, but the core message has not changed. The Catholic Church holds that human life has a value that legislatures cannot vote away.
Across Europe, the political class has largely moved in the opposite direction. France is the sharpest example, but the pattern extends beyond its borders. British lawmakers did vote down an assisted dying bill, offering a rare counterpoint. Still, the trajectory on the continent is clear, and even traditional defenders of faith in public life face pressure to retreat from religious identity.
Leo's encyclical on AI, his pro-life convictions, and his willingness to meet abuse survivors all point to a pope who wants to engage the modern world on its own ground, but on his own terms. France will test whether a secular democracy that has codified positions the Church considers grave moral errors is willing to listen, or whether the million people lining the Champs-Elysées represent a constituency their own government has stopped hearing.
The broader question of how faith intersects with institutional power is not limited to Europe. In the United States, political figures have drawn scrutiny for appointing officials tied to anti-Catholic controversies, a reminder that hostility toward traditional religious conviction is not exclusively a French problem.
When a country writes abortion into its constitution and legalizes assisted dying in the same political generation, a pope who shows up and says "That the world may have life" is not making small talk. He is drawing a line, and daring a secular nation to notice it still exists.
