Paris: Pope Leo XIV begins a four-day visit to France, with more than 600,000 Catholic faithful expected to gather in central Paris for a Mass at Place de la Concorde on Saturday.
An altar has been erected at the square, while police have sealed off large sections around the Champs-Élysées ahead of the afternoon celebration. Crowds are expected to extend along the avenue toward the Arc de Triomphe and beyond.
French President Emmanuel Macron will welcome the Pope at Orly airport on Friday before holding talks with him at the Élysée Palace. Their discussions are expected to cover geopolitical issues and artificial intelligence. Macron and Pope Leo will also deliver speeches in Metz during the visit.
Macron will not attend the Pope’s Masses, in keeping with France’s strict separation of state and religion. His wife, Brigitte Macron, and Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu are expected to attend the Paris Mass. Several political figures, including Marine Le Pen, Édouard Philippe, Gabriel Attal and Bruno Retailleau, are also due to attend.
Reports of tensions between the French presidency and the Vatican delegation over the arrangements for the visit were rejected by Élysée officials. They said France had offered the Pope a range of ceremonial options traditionally extended to visiting heads of state, including a cavalry escort along the Champs-Élysées, but that he was not expected to accept all of them.
The Vatican also declined a proposal from Macron for Pope Leo to meet artisans involved in rebuilding Notre-Dame Cathedral after the 2019 fire, with officials citing the Pope’s tight schedule.
Following a Popemobile procession through Paris on Friday, Pope Leo will visit Notre-Dame Cathedral before meeting about 80,000 young people at the Stade de France.
On Sunday, the Pope will travel to Lourdes, where about 150,000 people have registered for Mass at the Catholic sanctuary. He is also scheduled to meet victims of sexual abuse by members of the Catholic clergy.
The visit will conclude on Monday in Metz, northeastern France, where Pope Leo will pay tribute to Robert Schuman, a French statesman and one of the founding figures of European integration. Schuman, a devout Catholic, is currently a candidate for beatification.
Pope Leo XIV departs on his Apostolic Journey to Francehttps://t.co/hw7oRjaHQ1
— Vatican News (@VaticanNews) September 25, 2026
Pope Leo, born Robert Prevost in Chicago in 1955, has French ancestry through his paternal grandmother, who was born in Le Havre in Normandy in 1894.
France has a long and complex relationship with the Catholic Church. Once known as the “Eldest Daughter of the Church,” the country has undergone extensive secularization, with fewer than half of its population now identifying as Catholic.
Regular Catholic worship has also declined sharply. The proportion of regular worshippers fell from about 35 percent of the population in 1960 to less than 5 percent today, while the number of priests has dropped from around 25,000 in 1990 to fewer than 9,000.
At the same time, Catholic officials point to renewed interest in religious traditions. The number of adult baptisms in France more than doubled over five years, reaching about 10,000 in 2025.
Pope Leo’s visit is his first to France since becoming pontiff and comes after several recent papal visits to the country. Pope John Paul II visited France several times between 1980 and 2004, while Pope Francis visited Strasbourg, Marseille, and Corsica but did not travel to Paris.
