OUR LADY: Leo XIV in the first Papal visit to Notre Dame Cathedral Since the 2019 fire and renovation – Screengrab Social Media/Telegram

French popular response has been overwhelming.

No quasi-pagan ‘blessing of the ice’, no gay rainbow clothes in Cathedrals, no focus on leftist proselytism, no obsessing over Ukraine and Gaza.

Pope Leo XIV’s historic visit was surprisingly filled with… religion.

The eldest daughter of the Church, France blossomed to receive the Pontiff: church bells rang across the country for seven minutes to mark the arrival.

Leo rode his Popemobile while 300,000 people lined the streets of Paris with chants and flags.

He spent Vespers at the magnificent Notre-Dame Cathedral, the first papal visit since the 2019 fire and 2024 reopening.

There, 8,000 people chanted the Salve Rainha with him, bringing him to tears.

But there was so much more to come: Leo’s youth vigil at Stade de France gathered 80,000 fervent young people aged 17–35.

A visibly moved Leo called them ‘the saints of France’.

And the Christian ‘popular response’ in France is perhaps best expressed by the surge in adult baptisms.

The ‘secular Republic’ is seeing a sharp rise in chosen (rather than inherited) faith: in Easter 2026, a total of 21,386 adolescents and adults received baptisms – up 28% from 2025, and more than tripled since 2016 (4,124 that year).

In total, up to a million people are expected – in Paris alone – to catch a glimpse of Leo in the first Papal state visit to France in 18 years.

So, the terrain was fertile for Leo’s most important statement of the state visit, so far:

The Telegraph reported:

“Pope Leo XIV criticized assisted dying in a speech at the Elysée Palace in front of Emmanuel Macron, just weeks after France passed a law allowing euthanasia.

[…] Mr. Macron rolled out the red carpet at the presidential residence for the Pope, whose grandmother was French, but that did not prevent the pontiff from criticizing the new law.

‘I am concerned at times by those trends in society that risk turning science and technology into profit-driven ventures promoting genetic manipulation, surrogacy, the trade in human organs or the possibility of arranging one’s own death’, he said with Mr. Macron by his side.”

Read more:

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