Hundreds of thousands expected in Paris for Pope's visit
The highpoint of his time in Paris will be a giant Mass attended by more than half a million people.
Hundreds of thousands are expected in Paris for the Pope’s visit
Pope Leo starts his trip in the French capital before heading on to Lourdes and Metz
Pope Leo XIV begins a four-day visit to France on Friday, with the highlight a huge Mass in central Paris expected to draw more than half a million people.
For Saturday afternoon’s celebration, an altar has been erected on the Place de la Concorde, and police have sealed off a large area around the Champs-Élysées.
Around 600,000 Catholic faithful are expected to pack the avenue as far as the Arc de Triomphe and beyond.
Big crowds are also expected at other points on the Pope’s schedule, reflecting what the Church says is enthusiasm driven by a growing spiritual hunger among the French and other Europeans.
President Emmanuel Macron will welcome the Pope at Orly airport on Friday morning, then meet him at the Élysée Palace to discuss geopolitical issues and artificial intelligence (AI). He will also speak alongside the Pope in Metz.
However, the president will not attend any of the Pope’s Masses, largely to avoid violating France’s strict separation of state and religion.
Instead, the Champs-Élysées Mass will be attended by his wife Brigitte and Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu. Several contenders for next year’s presidential election are also expected, including Marine Le Pen of the nationalist right, centrists Edouard Philippe and Gabriel Attal, and conservative Bruno Retailleau.
There were reports of tensions between Macron and the Vatican team sent to organise the trip, with the president said to be frustrated by his wish for a more ceremonial visit.
Élysée officials dismissed that this week, saying it was standard to offer a visiting head of state — which the Pope is — a range of high-profile events, such as a cavalry escort down the Champs-Élysées. But they said it was never expected that the Pope would actually accept the offer.
They did confirm that Pope Leo rejected Macron’s idea of a meeting with artisans who helped rebuild the fire-damaged Notre-Dame cathedral. They said his schedule was too tight.
After a Popemobile ride through the crowds to Notre-Dame cathedral on Friday afternoon, Pope Leo XIV will be joined in the evening by 80,000 young people at the Stade de France in northern Paris.
On Sunday, 150,000 people have signed up to attend Mass in the Pyrenean sanctuary of Lourdes.
On Monday, the Pope will be in Metz, in northeast France, where he will pay tribute to Robert Schuman (1886-1963), a founding father of the European Union and a devout Catholic who is now a candidate for beatification.
The Pope will also meet a group of migrants in Paris, and in Lourdes some victims of sexual abuse by members of the Catholic clergy.
Born in Chicago in 1955, Pope Leo XIV was originally named Robert Prevost — a French name.
In fact, his paternal grandmother was born in Le Havre in Normandy in 1894. When she married in the US many years later, she and her Italian husband took the name Prevost, which had been her mother’s maiden name.
France has a historically complicated relationship with the Catholic Church of Rome. The country was long known as the “Eldest Daughter of the Church” because it was supposedly, though inaccurately, the first kingdom to convert to Christianity. In reality, Armenia, Georgia and Ethiopia did so earlier.
In the 14th century, the papacy went into exile in Avignon in southern France, and over the following centuries French armies periodically intervened in Italian politics, where popes were secular rulers as well as heads of the Church.
Napoleon held two popes captive.
Recent popes have all visited France, most notably John-Paul II, who came several times between 1980 and 2004, and Pope Francis, who came three times but avoided Paris, instead going to Strasbourg, Marseilles and Corsica.
Today France has secularised along with the rest of Europe, and fewer than half of the population identifies as Catholic.
The number of regular worshippers has dropped from 35% of the population in 1960 to less than 5% today, while the number of priests has fallen by two-thirds from 25,000 in 1990 to fewer than 9,000.
But in recent years there have been signs of renewed interest in religious tradition, with the number of adult baptisms more than doubling in five years to reach 10,000 in 2025.
“France has indeed secularised, but there is a void where God and values used to be,” said Cardinal François Bustillo, Bishop of Ajaccio.
“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,” he said.