The Pope is arriving like a rock star in Paris next month, taking centre stage at a mass rally of French youth in the Stade de France. The stadium’s 80,000 seats were quickly snapped up online for Leo XIV’s evening prayer vigil on 25 September.

The following day, the Pope will celebrate an open-air mass in Place de la Concorde. More than 200,000 worshippers have already reserved places and a sea of 300,000 faithful are expected to congregate in the nearby Champs-Élysées.

The stage is also set for delicate diplomatic tensions when the Pope meets with French president Emmanuel Macron at the Élysée Palace. Macron’s government just adopted a law permitting assisted suicide. The Pope has publicly expressed his opposition to legalised euthanasia. It is believed Macron hastily promulgated the law last month so the issue will not be hanging in the air during the Pope’s official visit to France.

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The Pope’s arrival in France has also rekindled deep divisions within the Church between progressive and ultra-conservative Catholics. Ahead of the Pope’s scheduled visit to Lourdes, the Church recently banned the ultra-traditionalist Society of Saint Pius X from celebrating mass at the town’s famous Marian shrine dedicated to the Virgin Mary. Last month, the Society of Saint Pius X provoked a schism with the Vatican by defiantly ordaining four bishops without papal consent. The Pope responded by excommunicating the ultra-conservative Catholic sect’s followers. Last week, Bishop Jean-Marc Micas of Tarbes-Lourdes also said that mosaics designed by Fr Marko Rupnik at the Lourdes shrine will be covered during the Pope’s visit – Rupnik is facing an ongoing canonical trial over allegations of sexual abuse. 

These tensions and dramas demonstrate that, even in the fiercely secular French Republic, the country’s profoundly Catholic identity persists. Some even claim that Catholicism in France is making a comeback. For many,........

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