Pope Leo’s Stunningly Successful French Visit Echoes the Epochal Pilgrimage of John Paul II to His Homeland

The visit to France by Pope Leo XIV was so stunningly successful and popular that it reminds me of the historic nine-day pilgrimage of Saint John Paul II to Poland between June 2 and 10 in 1979.My wife Callista and I were so deeply moved by the impact of Saint John Paul II in his first visit home as a native son that we produced a movie, “Nine Days That Changed the World.” The enormous emotional outburst of the Polish people over those days shook the Soviet empire and created real impetus for Solidarity as a union movement insisting on freedom. It was in many ways the beginning of the end for communist domination of Poland.An estimated 3 million persons came to Victory Square at Warsaw and heard the pope invoke the Holy Spirit and pray: “Let your Spirit descend! And renew the face of the earth. The face of this land!” The world changed.Pope Leo XIV on September 26, 2026 at Paris. Vatican Pool/Getty ImagesAs one witness to that moment said in our film, the Poles suddenly realized that there were a lot more of them than there were secret police. Why should the Poles be afraid of them?I felt a parallel in the cultural and political challenge of Catholicism to the modern secular, antireligious state when I watched the huge outpouring of affection and enthusiasm for Pope Leo XIV as he toured France for four days.The historic war against the Catholic Church had deep roots in the French Revolution. Callista and I had the opportunity to visit Picpus Cemetery at the heart of Paris. The Marquis de Lafayette is buried there. He was not harmed in the revolution, since he was a national hero. Yet he and his wife chose to be buried near the 1,300 aristocrats who had been killed by the French revolutionaries during the terror.A public execution at Paris in 1793 during the French Revolution, depicted by Pierre-Antoine Demachy, ‘Une exécution capitale, place de la Révolution,’ detail. Via Wikimedia CommonsThe cemetery is also haunting, because of the guillotining of 16 Carmelite nuns and religious sisters who preferred death to renouncing Christ. They went one by one to the guillotine singing religious songs. Their fate was captured powerfully in Francis Poulenc’s opera “Dialogues des Carmélites.” With this backdrop of the state’s war against the Church, I found it amazing that Pope Leo could attract such huge and enthusiastic crowds. Consider the triumphal tour that he carried across France.He opened with a prayer vigil at Paris with 80,000 young Catholics. Then he celebrated an open-air mass for an estimated 800,000 people. The enthusiasm was so enormous that priests were randomly hearing confessions out in the open along the sides of the streets.Pope Leo XIV at Paris’s Notre-Dame Cathedral on September 25, 2026 at Paris. Vatican Media via Getty ImagesAt the famous shrine of Lourdes, more than 150,000 people attended Sunday Mass. In a compelling moment, Pope Leo met individually and in private with four men and three women who had been victims of sexual abuse in the Church. He prayed with them and urged continued compassion and continued strengthening of the Church’s behavior.Finally, at Metz, which John Paul had visited in 1988, Pope Leo celebrated Mass at the Cathedral of St. Stephen with an overflow crowd of 35,000 (about 2,000 could fit into the cathedral).If Pope Leo’s visit has the same catalytic effect on French culture that Saint John Paul II had on Poland 47 years ago, it will be a major step in turning the tide against the antireligious secularism which has been so dominant among European elites.

Pope Leo’s Stunningly Successful French Visit Echoes the Epochal Pilgrimage of John Paul II to His Homeland

Pope Leo’s Stunningly Successful French Visit Echoes the Epochal Pilgrimage of John Paul II to His Homeland

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