Pope Leo XIV is preparing for his first official visit to France from Sept. 25 to 28, where he is expected to speak about the protection of human life in a country where Catholic influence has declined and laws on abortion and assisted dying have moved further away from traditional Church teaching.
The four-day visit will take the pope to Paris, Lourdes and Metz, combining religious events with meetings involving French political leaders, European figures and UNESCO. It will be the first formal papal state visit to France in nearly two decades.
One of the most closely watched parts of the trip will be Leo’s visit to Lourdes, the Catholic pilgrimage site associated with healing and the sick. The pope is expected to use the occasion to reaffirm the Church’s teaching on the value and protection of human life.
That message will arrive in a country where the legal framework has changed significantly. France incorporated the right to abortion into its Constitution in 2024, while lawmakers recently approved legislation allowing certain adults with incurable illnesses to receive life-ending medication under defined conditions. Both abortion and assisted dying are opposed by Catholic teaching.
France remains historically Catholic but operates under a strict principle of secularism. The 1905 law separating church and state continues to shape public life, while surveys show that a growing share of the population identifies with no religion. Recent data cited by EWTN found that 51% of French adults reported having no religious affiliation in 2019-2020, up from a decade earlier.
The pope’s message is therefore expected to extend beyond abortion and end-of-life issues. Catholic social teaching on human dignity, migration, peace and artificial intelligence is also likely to feature during the trip.
In Paris, Leo will address leaders at UNESCO, where AI is expected to be among the subjects discussed. The pope has increasingly emphasized the need to consider the human consequences of rapidly developing technology, linking AI regulation to questions of dignity and the common good.
The visit also comes as the Catholic Church continues to deal with the consequences of its clergy abuse crisis in France. A 2021 investigation estimated that about 330,000 children were abused by clergy and other people working in the French Catholic Church over seven decades.
Leo is scheduled to meet abuse survivors during his visit to Lourdes, making accountability and the Church’s response to victims another significant part of the trip.
Despite the country’s secular character, the visit has generated substantial interest. Organisers expect hundreds of thousands of people at the pope’s outdoor Mass in Paris, with some estimates reaching around one million people seeing him during the visit.
The final stop will be Metz, near France’s border with Germany, where Leo is expected to discuss Europe’s Christian heritage, peace and unity. The location also carries historical significance because Robert Schuman, one of the founding figures of European integration, lived there.
Leo’s France visit will therefore put several competing forces in the spotlight: a Catholic Church seeking to reaffirm its social teaching, a French society shaped by strong secular principles, and political debates over issues ranging from assisted dying to migration and artificial intelligence.
The pope’s challenge will be to communicate the Church’s position while engaging with a society whose laws, religious identity and public institutions have increasingly developed along secular lines.
