George Lapshynov explores Pope Leo XIV’s recent visit to France and unpacks the tension within French secularism. 01/10/2026

France has long managed to sustain two rather contradictory reputations. It is the country once called the “eldest daughter of the Church”, whose landscape, history and culture are saturated with Christianity. It is also the home of laïcité and of proudly secular republicanism in which religion is expected to know its place.

Over four days at the end of September, Pope Leo XIV rather spectacularly complicated the second half of that story.

On Friday night, 80,000 young people gathered at the Stade de France for a prayer vigil. The following afternoon, around 800,000 people gathered on the Champs–Élysées and around the Place de la Concorde for Mass. Another 150,000 people attended in Lourdes on Sunday. In Paris, multitudes of priests heard confessions from penitents kneeling in the streets against the backdrop of some of the world’s most luxurious and unpenitent brands.

For as far as that is possible in the city of Notre–Dame and the Sacré–Cœur, it was Christianity at its least discreet.

Perhaps inevitably, not everyone in France was comfortable with the Catholic Church taking part in moral and political debates so prominently. Some commentators objected that the Roman Pontiff had been given an insufficiently critical platform from which to “lecture France” on abortion, surrogacy and assisted dying, among other issues.

Immediately before Pope Leo arrived, Charlie Hebdo ran a piece entitled “The week of street prayers”, provocatively describing those coming to see the Pope as dévots fétichistes – fetishist devotees. Another article examined, with some alarm, the increasingly visible attraction of young people towards Catholic traditions and practices: pilgrimages, Eucharistic adoration, kneeling and the Traditional Latin Mass. On mainstream French radio, a presenter said that the Pope’s insistence that “what is legal is not necessarily moral” (a principle so sound as to border on the truism) had disturbed her and given her “vertigo”.

Some members of the French public, under the impression “that street prayers were banned in France”, even questioned the legality of whole affair. Of course, they are not illegal as such. But given the political rhetoric around secularism, however, it is not surprising that its boundaries are widely misunderstood.

Indeed, laïcité, at least as far as the letter of the law is concerned, protects the freedom to believe, not to believe, and to practise a religion. Citizens may generally manifest religion through clothing, worship and processions in public, subject to public–order rules and particular legal restrictions. Only the state and its agents must remain religiously neutral at all times.

But the popular meaning of laïcité is a different affair. In the French government’s own 2025 survey, fewer than half of respondents chose the standard legal definition when asked how they personally thought laïcité should be defined; 17% said it should prohibit visible religious clothing or signs in the street, while another 12% thought users of public services should also be required to remain religiously neutral.

French politicians can be more selective about the definition still. In 2017, while attacking Muslim street prayers, Marine Le Pen declared that the street was a public space “where religions have no place to express themselves”. Nine years later, she and Jordan Bardella were among the politicians attending the Pope’s open–air Mass. This raises the awkward question of whether the objection is really to religion in public space, or to particular religions occupying it.

Pope Leo, for his part, made the distinction between a secular state and a secularised public square central to his first speech at the Élysée.

A Christian participating in public life, he told France’s political establishment, cannot automatically be treated as “a proselytiser or a threat to the unity of the nation”. A “just” secularism, in his telling, distinguishes Church and state without pretending that religious convictions cease to exist when Christians enter politics.

The Pope then proceeded to demonstrate exactly what he meant.

Standing before the President, he gave an unapologetically Christian account of France itself. France’s “spiritual, cultural, intellectual, artistic and missionary genius”, he argued, had been nourished by Christianity. Humanism, human dignity and even liberté, égalité, fraternité were, in his account, downstream from that inheritance. Even Europe, he said three days later in Metz, cannot be spoken of “without mentioning Christianity”.

Nor did he confine himself to heritage and stained glass. He criticised surrogacy, genetic manipulation, organ trafficking and the offer of a “planned death” – a scarcely disguised intervention in France’s fierce debate over assisted dying. He even recalled Macron’s own words from 2018: a President who pretended to be uninterested in the Church and Catholics would “fail in his duty”.

Yet, despite criticism in parts of the media, the French political establishment was hardly united in resenting this religious intervention. Macron himself exulted in Leo’s visit. Senior politicians from across much of the political spectrum attended the Mass. Former Prime Minister Gabriel Attal said the crowds, of which he was a part, revealed a French need for greater “communion and gathering”.

Whatever one thinks of the Pope or the Catholic Church, and despite the persistence of narratives of religious decline, all recognised it is a force to contend with. Few secular institutions, and indeed perhaps none of the presidential contenders, in contemporary France can bring this many people, old and young, conservative and socialist, together in the centre of Paris so peacefully and joyfully.

Leo XIV therefore exposed, by his mere presence but also by his carefully chosen words, a tension within French secularism itself: between a legal principle that protects religious expression and a cultural instinct, present in parts of French public life, that still expects serious religion to make itself scarce.

He punctured the assumption that Christianity is no longer a relevant force in twenty–first century France, whether socially or politically. For several extraordinary days, Christianity escaped the heritage site, the “private conscience” and the carefully marked religious box of secularism. It prayed in stadiums, processed through streets, heard confessions on the Champs–Élysées and addressed political power in its own language.

To nobody’s surprise, the Republic survived the pontiff’s supposed intrusion in its secular affairs.

Perhaps France can now stop pretending laïcité means religion has no role to play in its public life.

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