Pope Leo’s trip to France could have been considered just another trip that takes place according to the usual protocols. Instead, it proved disruptive, both spiritually and, perhaps above all, culturally. The trip was to one of the most secularized countries on the continent, where the secularity of the state has been a flag waved for nearly 250 years. One of the trophies secularized France has been able to display is the inclusion in the Constitution, in 2024, of a woman’s guaranteed right to abortion — the first country in the world to boast this inhumane distinction.

Furthermore, just weeks before Pope Leo XIV set foot on French soil, on August 18, 2026, Macron enacted a new law creating a “right to assisted suicide,” or the right to assisted suicide for certain people suffering from serious and incurable diseases. Both measures were carried out under the watchful guidance of President Emmanuel Macron, who pursued highly secularized policies based above all on individual autonomy. It was this last measure in particular, approved, as mentioned, a few weeks before the Pope’s arrival, that paved the way for a certain cooling of institutional relations, which also involved the presence or absence of President Macron at key moments of the visit.

It’s no coincidence that one of the most significant passages of the Pope’s speech at the Elysée Palace on September 25, delivered right in front of Macron, is the conclusion. Leo XIV echoed the same words Macron had spoken to the French bishops in 2018, recalling that: “A Church that claims to be disinterested in temporal matters would not fully fulfill its vocation; and a President of the Republic who claims to be disinterested in the Church and Catholics would be failing in his duty.” It is difficult to consider that choice of phrasing right in front of Macron a coincidence; the Pope essentially gave him back his own words from eight years earlier.

A fairly clear message can be gleaned from this: French laïcité should not mean that Catholics must limit themselves to the private sphere, nor that their contribution to public debate is considered illegitimate when it conflicts with the choices of the political majority. Believers, in the conception proposed by Leo XIV, can intervene in society precisely as citizens and bearers of a specific conception of humanity and the common good.

Leo XIV was even clearer when, from Lourdes, he stated, “The temptation to take life under the pretext of false compassion must be firmly rejected,” thus expressing strong reservations about the assisted dying recently legalized in France. And when, on the return flight on September 28, he was asked whether these interventions did not constitute political interference, Leo XIV openly defended the Church’s right and duty to express its position on moral issues, specifying that he did not intend to enter into French party politics but to clarify the Church’s teaching.

Thus, a certain tension over life and human dignity, not even so subtle, preceded Pope Leo’s trip to France.

France, as is well known, is the country of the 1789 Revolution, whose symbol is encapsulated in the words Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. These three words had already been influenced by the Enlightenment, but during that period they were definitively stripped of the Christian meaning they had held until then, to be interpreted in an absolutely secular sense. With them, the Catholic religion was expelled from public life. New pagan references and a new calendar replaced the Christian God, the saints, and the martyrs. Thousands of priests, religious figures, and clergy were summarily executed by guillotine. Thousands of churches were closed and expropriated, along with the real estate and artistic heritage of the French Church. All of this was not merely an expression of “secularism” in the modern sense of state neutrality; there were many moments in which it took openly anticlerical and antireligious forms. That historical period at times took on the characteristics of veritable terror. In that context, a conception of public space took shape where the Catholic religion ceased to be the common reference point of society and was progressively replaced by a civil religion founded on new revolutionary principles. In short, the Revolution began a profound process of de-Christianization of society.

That revolution, which had evolved from a political to a primarily cultural one, then spread throughout the world. Therefore, in a certain sense, Leo XIV’s journey was intended to test the current results of that culture which, as St. John Paul II repeatedly emphasized during his pontificate, has revealed itself to be a “culture of death.” Has this secularized culture brought “more life” into people’s lives, or has it produced a conception of life and the person defined by death and “structures of sin,” characterized by an anti-solidarity culture?

We can see firsthand how human happiness, as a whole, has decreased rather than increased, especially if we measure it by the desperation caused by drugs and drug addiction among younger generations, the spread of pornography even among children, and the high levels of mental distress, almost unprecedented in the history of our culture.

What happened with the Pope’s arrival in a country where faith is now considered marginalized, as if dead and defunct? Something happened that surprised everyone, perhaps even the Pope himself: an explosion of life, a rush to welcome the Pontiff by hundreds of thousands of people, a rush to line up for confession along the Champs-Élysées. And then the explosion of the Latin chant of the Salve Regina in the Paris stadium by 80,000 young people (discussed in a previous article).

Of all that happened during the papal trip, however, I would like to focus on one episode: the moving image of the disabled little girl blessed by the Pope. Her mother was interviewed by Le Figaro; the press photo expresses the point more clearly than a thousand words, and it went around the world and moved many people. It shows Pope Leo XIV blessing an 11-year-old girl named Marie-Garance on the Champs-Élysées.

As Gavin Ashenden reports:

Marie-Garance, who suffers from severe multiple disabilities, was waiting with her mother and little sister Pépa in an area reserved for wheelchair users. The meeting had not been planned. Those around them began to say that the Pope needed to see these two little girls. Marie-Garance was passed from hand to hand through the crowd, and a Vatican gendarme picked her up and carried her to him. The Pope traced a small cross on her forehead with his finger. Pépa also received the blessing.

Alyssa Murphy reports in the National Catholic Register:

Adopted in 2016, Marie-Garance is one of nine children in the Noël family. According to a 2023 interview published by Aleteia, Clotilde and Nicolas Noël are parents to six biological children and have also adopted three children with disabilities: Marie, who has Down syndrome; Marie-Garance, who has multiple disabilities; and Frédéric-Moïse, who has a cerebellar disorder. Marie-Garance’s mother, Clotilde, explained that her daughter requires significant daily care, including medication and feeding via a gastrostomy tube. Yet the Noël family’s story is not defined only by hardship. It is a powerful testimony to the joy of embracing life, trusting in God, and loving each child as a unique gift.

In 2018, Clotilde wrote a book titled Tombée du Nid (Fall from the Nest), which details her experience caring for her beautiful children, especially the sickest ones. The book inspired an entire organization, founded by Clotilde and her husband with the sole purpose of supporting families raising children with disabilities and parents who adopt them. “It was as if God was telling me, ‘I’m calling you. You’re the one I’ve chosen,’” she told Aleteia. “I accepted that I had to trust Him, and I’m receiving incredible graces. Once you say ‘yes’ to God, everything happens naturally. He never abandons us.” In difficult times she relied on Mother Teresa of Calcutta. And one day, a surprise arrived: “A priest friend gave me a relic of Mother Teresa. It’s a great opportunity! When Marie-Garance is sick, I put the relic on her. I even take it with me to the hospital. I believe in the communion of saints. They always work for us.” And finally, quoting Christiane Singer: “Love exists if there is a struggle, a friction, a hand-to-hand encounter with Creation, a battle with the angel, a confrontation with the shadow that inhabits us.” “It’s very embodied,” Clotilde said. “I’ve been through all this, and I think love is possible if we’ve overcome the shadow that inhabits us. That’s what love is: it’s not a long, calm river. On the contrary, it invites us to delve into our depths.”

This story, which mysteriously intersects with that of a Pope walking the two kilometers of the Champs-Élysées surrounded by 800,000 people, is more moving than words. And it is the image that, more than any other, shatters the ideological dreams of a culture of death. It is a photo that immediately makes us understand that every life is valuable, every life is worth living, every life is willed by God from eternity. And that life will not be triumphant through an abortion law inserted into the Constitution, nor through a law that supports assisted suicide, an outpost of euthanasia. Of this, Macron can be certain.

In France, but also in the rest of the world, this has become clear: life, willed by God, conquers death brought by the sin of men.