Pope Leo draws vast Paris crowd with appeal for France to renew its faith

Pope Leo draws vast Paris crowd with appeal for France to renew its faith
Pope Leo XIV celebrated an outdoor Mass at Paris’s Place de la Concorde on Saturday before an estimated 800,000 people, according to local authorities cited by the Vatican. The gathering capped a papal procession of nearly three kilometres along the Champs-Élysées, where many attendees had waited for hours to see him.

In his homily, Leo focused on individual dignity and France’s spiritual renewal. “None of us is merely a number or an entry in a register, but a unique and irreplaceable person” in God’s eyes, he told the congregation. He urged those assembled to seek “God, life, truth, unity, peace, communion and happiness,” and to help build “a renewed nation” rooted in faith.

For families in the crowd, the visit carried a more personal meaning. Thibault Lecauchois, who travelled two hours with his wife and two young children, said they wanted the children to receive the pope’s blessing and to share the occasion with other Catholics. He described Leo as “a pope of hope” whose message of peace mattered in the present moment.

The Paris Mass followed a wider programme that included meetings with migrants at the Casa Bakhita support centre and with new Catholics and catechumens at the Catholic Institute of Paris. Leo later travelled to Lourdes, where he led a short prayer service and spent time in private prayer at the shrine.

Organisers had anticipated roughly 700,000 people for the Mass, involving about 2,400 priests and deacons, 100 bishops and 1,300 singers. The event came amid reports of rising adult and teenage baptisms in France, even as earlier data indicated that a majority of French adults had no religious affiliation.

The contrasting figures point to the central context of Leo’s visit: a highly visible expression of Catholic participation alongside a broader, religiously diverse French society. At Notre-Dame the previous day, he linked the cathedral’s post-fire reconstruction to a wider call for renewal, saying it had been reborn “so that you too may be reborn.”

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