Pope Leo XIV begins a four-day visit to France on Friday, his first to the country since becoming head of the Catholic Church. The main event of the visit will be Saturday afternoon’s Mass in central Paris, which authorities expect more than half a million faithful to attend.
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The altar has been set up at Place de la Concorde. Police will cordon off and monitor a large part of the area near the Champs-Élysées, while around 600,000 faithful are expected to fill the boulevard up to the Arc de Triomphe and the surrounding areas. Large crowds are also expected at the Pope’s other stops.
President Emmanuel Macron will welcome Pope Leo XIV on Friday morning at Orly Airport. They will then hold talks at the Élysée Palace, where geopolitical issues and artificial intelligence are expected to be on the agenda. The two will also deliver a joint speech during the visit to Metz.
Macron will not attend the Pope’s Masses, in order to respect the separation of church and state, a principle of particular importance in France. His wife, Brigitte Macron, and Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu are expected to attend Saturday’s Mass on the Champs-Élysées.
Marine Le Pen, Édouard Philippe, Gabriel Attal and Bruno Retailleau are also expected to be among those attending. These political figures could run in next year’s presidential election.
The organization of the visit was accompanied by reports of disagreements between the French presidency and the Vatican team drawing up the program. According to those reports, Macron had requested more ceremony, but Élysée officials denied that there had been tensions.
French officials explained that official ceremonies, including a cavalry escort along the Champs-Élysées, are customary offerings for a head of state visiting France, a status the Pope also holds. They added that they did not necessarily expect every proposal to be accepted.
The Vatican confirmed that, because of his packed schedule, Pope Leo XIV had declined Macron’s invitation to meet the artisans who helped rebuild Notre-Dame after the devastating fire in 2019.
On Friday afternoon, after traveling by Popemobile through the crowds, the Pope will go to Notre-Dame Cathedral. In the evening, at the Stade de France, north of Paris, he will meet around 80,000 young people.
Sunday’s stop will be Lourdes, one of the most important Catholic pilgrimage centers in the world. Around 150,000 people have registered for the Mass there. The Pope will also meet several people who say they were victims of sexual abuse by members of the Catholic clergy.
On Monday, Leo XIV will travel to Metz, in northeastern France, to honor Robert Schuman. He was one of the founding figures of the European Union, a devout Catholic and is currently a candidate for beatification. During his stay in France, the Pope will also meet with a group of migrants.
Leo XIV has family ties to France. He was born in Chicago in 1955 under the name Robert Prevost, while his paternal grandmother was born in Le Havre, Normandy, in 1894. After she married a man of Italian origin in the United States, the family took the surname Prevost, which had been her mother’s maiden name.
France’s relationship with the Catholic Church and the Holy See has historically been complicated. For centuries, the country was called the “eldest daughter of the Church,” although the claim that France was the first kingdom to accept Christianity is not historically accurate: Armenia, Georgia and Ethiopia converted earlier.
In the 14th century, the papacy was based for a period in Avignon, in southern France. In the centuries that followed, French armies intervened from time to time in Italian politics, when popes exercised territorial power alongside their religious leadership. Napoleon Bonaparte held two popes under arrest.
Recent popes have also traveled to France. Pope John Paul II visited several times between 1980 and 2004. Pope Francis went three times, but not to Paris: his stops were Strasbourg, Marseille and Corsica.
Today, France is far more secular than it once was, and fewer than half of its inhabitants identify as Catholic. Regular attendance at religious services has fallen from around 35% of the population in 1960 to less than 5% today. The number of priests has also declined by around two-thirds, from 25,000 in 1990 to fewer than 9,000.
Nevertheless, the Catholic Church sees the interest in the visit as a sign of spiritual thirst in France and Europe, despite the long-standing secularization of French society. Another indicator of growing interest in religious traditions is the number of adults being baptized: it has more than doubled in five years, reaching around 10,000 in 2025.
“France has become secular, but there is a void where God and values once were,” said Cardinal François Bustillo, bishop of Ajaccio. According to him, many people are seeking spiritual fulfillment and are becoming acquainted with different religious traditions around the world.
“Now the Pope is coming from Rome, reminding people of their roots,” Bustillo said. He added: “John Paul II awakened the East. Now Leo XIV will awaken the West.”
