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Hundreds of thousands of people poured into central Paris on Saturday to take part in an open-air mass celebrated by Pope Leo XIV, in a turnout the Vatican put at 700,000 — a figure that comfortably exceeded the roughly 600,000 people who had registered in advance of the event. The gathering at the Place de la Concorde, the capital's largest public square, formed the centrepiece of the American pontiff's four-day apostolic journey to France and offered an early verdict on how much appetite still exists for a papal visit in a country whose Catholic identity has been steadily eroding.
The scale of the crowd was striking for a head of state whose presence in France is, by his own account, partly an act of reconciliation. Leo greeted flag-waving, cheering throngs from the popemobile as he made his way along the Champs-Élysees, the 1.9-kilometre avenue that functions as France's most ceremonial thoroughfare, where national parades and celebrations are traditionally staged. The route allowed tens of thousands more people to see the pontiff at close quarters, extending the day beyond the square itself and turning the mass into a procession as much as a service. On arrival at the Concorde, the pope led hundreds of thousands of people in prayer.
The visit began on Friday and is the first official papal trip to France in 18 years. That gap is the central fact hovering over every event of the tour, which has been organised as a deliberate attempt to repair the standing of the Roman Catholic Church in a highly secular society where attendance at Mass has declined for decades. A crowd of this size gives Leo visible evidence that the office still commands attention, even if that attention is not always what the Church would want: many who flock to the Concorde came as spectators of a global figure rather than as practising Catholics.
Much of the trip's symbolism is shaped by the Church's reckoning with abuse in France. Five years ago, an inquiry established that 330,000 children had been sexually abused by clergy and lay members over a period of seven decades. Leo's itinerary has repeatedly placed that trauma at the centre of the visit, and on Sunday he is due to travel to the southwestern town of Lourdes, where he is scheduled to meet seven French victims of clerical abuse. The meeting is widely seen as the emotional high point of the journey, a piece of theatre that no figurehead can manufacture and that no crowd can manufacture for him.
A second contested issue runs alongside the abuse question. Leo has been openly challenging a recently approved French law permitting assisted dying, and his public comments on the subject have placed him at odds with a legislature that passed the measure with cross-party support. The dispute has added a political edge to a visit otherwise designed as a gesture of unity, and it has prompted some critics to question whether a pontiff seeking reconciliation should be wading into a live national debate so early in the trip.
The guest list on Saturday was read as carefully as the liturgy. French President Emmanuel Macron was not present for the mass and was represented instead by his wife, Brigitte — a conspicuous absence for a state visit of this kind, and one that underscores the cooling distance between the Elysee and the Vatican. Among those who did attend was Marine Le Pen, the far-right presidential hopeful who currently leads the polls ahead of an election due in mid-April. Her presence, in a crowd that also included Macron's wife and large numbers of families and young people, captures the strange coalition of support the pope has assembled: an eclectic, largely non-confessional audience united less by doctrine than by curiosity and by the sheer spectacle of a papal motorcade.
Expert observers have been careful about how far to read the enthusiasm. Francois Mabille, director of the Geopolitical Observatory on Religion, told broadcaster RMC that the atmosphere recalled the fervour of crowds who came out more than 40 years ago for John Paul II — a comparison that sets a demanding benchmark, and one that implicitly asks whether today's numbers reflect durable revival or a one-off spectacle surrounding a popular figure.
Friday provided a second marker of the visit's reach. An estimated 300,000 people turned out along the pontiff's route to Notre Dame Cathedral, where Leo met Macron and delivered a rare speech at the Elysee Palace, the official presidential residence. In it, he lavished praise on French society, describing it as the product of a people whose varied origins had enlivened and enriched both the nation and its democracy — remarks that read as an indirect appeal to a country in the middle of its own argument about immigration, belonging and national cohesion.
The pope has also used the trip to press a warning about technology. Leo said artificial intelligence could erode human dignity, cautioning that a "paradise of machines" risked costing people their humanity. The intervention is notable less for its novelty — the Church has engaged with AI ethics elsewhere — than for the platform, arriving in the capital of a country that has spent years wrestling with the regulation of technology and a rapidly growing technology sector.
For a Church whose influence in secular France has been shrinking for generations, the arithmetic of Saturday is ambiguous. Beating advance registration by around 100,000 people, on a day when competing events and ordinary weekend duties normally thin any crowd, suggests genuine enthusiasm. But a turnout measured in the hundreds of thousands does not, by itself, rebuild institutions. The more consequential test comes on Sunday in Lourdes, where the pope will sit opposite seven people whose lives were damaged by the institution he heads. If the Concorde demonstrated that the office still draws a crowd, Lourdes will show whether it still commands trust.
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