Corrispondenza Romana
September 30, 2026
On the eve of the papal visit, a meticulous report by the European Centre for Law and Justice (ECLJ), entitled Souffrances et espérance de l'Église en France and compiled by Grégor Puppinck with Constance Avenel, documented the heavy pressures exerted by the secular state in the areas of family, education, healthcare, and bioethical legislation. To this picture must be added the acts of violence against churches, shrines, and the faithful. On March 4, 2024, France became the first country in the world to enshrine abortion in its constitutional rights, and on August 19, 2026, it published in its Official Gazette a new law approving assisted suicide and euthanasia. In response, independent Catholic schools are growing in number, baptisms are on the rise, and young people are participating in ever greater numbers in the great pilgrimages, such as that to Chartres. This year in France there were 21,386 new baptisms — twenty percent more than the previous year — among them 8,152 adolescents and 13,234 adults, most of them young. "Like you, I am astonished by the number of people who are returning to the threshold of the faith," the Pope declared at his encounter with the Institut Catholique on the morning of September 26.
The culminating moment of the papal journey was the Mass celebrated at the Place de la Concorde, in the heart of Paris, on the afternoon of September 26th, before an immense crowd estimated at 800,000 people. An event of profound symbolic character, given what this square once represented.
The Place de la Concorde, designed in 1755 by the architect Ange-Jacques Gabriel, was originally known as the Place Louis XV. The French Revolution changed the history of this site forever. The great square became the principal theater of Jacobin capital executions, and in 1792 it was renamed the Place de la Révolution. The guillotine transformed capital punishment into a public spectacle before which the Republic demonstrated its power to suppress all "enemies of the people." On January 21, 1793, King Louis XVI was beheaded there; on October 16 of the same year, Queen Marie Antoinette followed. The crime of Louis XVI was that of being a king. What was condemned to death by the Revolutionary Tribunal was not the man but the monarchical institution he represented. The square conceived to celebrate the oldest Catholic monarchy in Europe thus became the site of its symbolic annihilation. "The mere title of king," Robespierre proclaimed, "draws down the scourges of war upon the troubled nation." But Robespierre himself, following Danton, was guillotined at the Place de la Concorde in 1794: the Revolution devoured its children without mercy.
Pope Pius VI, in the allocution Quare lacrymae delivered in Consistory on June 17, 1793, attributed to Louis XVI "the glory of martyrdom." He declared: "Who could ever doubt that this king was put to death out of hatred for the Faith and in contempt of the dogmas of Catholicism?" At the origin of the trial and condemnation of the French sovereign, Pius VI explained, lay the "impious ideologies" of "perverse philosophers" — the leading figures of the Enlightenment. From the very beginning of his pontificate, with the bull Inscrutabile Divinae of December 25, 1775, the Pontiff, addressing the Christian people and their pastors, had expressed his anguish at seeing that "restless and furious men, as though driven by an irresistible passion for novelty, do not hesitate to attack the very foundations of rational nature and endeavor — if they could — to subvert them entirely." The principal revolutionary instrument was the flood of books inspired by Enlightenment ideas that had inundated France since the reign of Louis XV. For this reason, Pius VI exhorted the French bishops: "Remove the evil from among you — that is, with great energy and solicitude, strive to eliminate from your flock all these poisoned books."
The Enlightenment constitutes a decisive phase of that ideological process which, from the humanist and Protestant Revolution, has led in less than five centuries to the Communist Revolution. Lenin wrote: "We shall probably have to follow… the advice that Engels once gave to the German socialists: to translate and disseminate among the masses the French Enlightenment and atheist publications of the eighteenth century." But if it is true that the Revolution must continually renew its errors, an authentic Catholic reaction cannot cease to combat those errors, which have spread throughout the world and have unfortunately penetrated even within the Church. Leo XIV himself appeared to overlook the historical significance of the Enlightenment, describing it in his address at the Élysée Palace on September 25 as "a stage that brought to the world important achievements in the domain of human rights." And yet, the following day, before his meeting with the synodal assembly, the Pope paused in prayer in the garden adjacent to the Institut Catholique, before the plaque bearing the inscription Hic ceciderunt — "Here they fell" — marking the spot where, in September 1792, approximately 115 priests and bishops suffered martyrdom for refusing to renounce their fidelity to the See of Peter. The murderers of these witnesses of the faith — later beatified by the Church — were steeped in precisely that Enlightenment ideology which aimed to eradicate the Christian roots of society. The Festival of the Goddess Reason celebrated in the Cathedral of Notre-Dame on November 10, 1793, marked the apogee of the dechristianization sought by the "Philosophy of the Enlightenment." It was for this reason that Pius XI, in his address of October 17, 1926, on the occasion of the beatification of the martyrs of the September massacres, recalled "the upheaval of the public order which, at the end of the eighteenth century, had its origin in France and swept away all things, sacred and profane, raging not only against the king and the nobility, but above all against the Church and her ministers. Most wicked men, who had unlawfully seized power, masking under the appearance of philosophy the hatred that animated them against the Church, strove with all their might to blot out the very name of Christian."
Leo XIV, during his journey, claimed for humanity "respect for human dignity and the fundamental rights and freedoms that derive from human nature" (Address at the Élysée Palace, September 25). But the denial of the existence of a human nature — as the source of the rights and duties of man — was theorized by the Enlightenment and found its expression in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789. Article 4 of that declaration defines liberty as the ability to "do anything that does not harm others"; Article 5 adds that the law may prohibit only those actions that are harmful to society. But is it sufficient that an action causes no harm to others for it to be morally good — with no reference whatsoever to a natural law that transcends the will of men? Who determines what constitutes harm to others? When freedom is understood as a mere faculty of choosing, rather than as a faculty of choosing the good, the limits inscribed in human nature come to appear as obstacles to be removed and are replaced by man's pretension to determine by himself, and to impose upon others, what he considers the good of society. That is what occurred during the French Revolution, and that is what is occurring in the France of Emmanuel Macron, who appeals to that foundational event.
"No one," Leo XIV reaffirmed at Lourdes on September 27, "has the right, ever, on the basis of laboratory algorithms, to decide the fate of a particular embryo or of a particular elderly person." This claimed right issues from the poisoned springs of the Enlightenment — against which we set the words of Pope Leo himself at the Place de la Concorde: "Seeing you gathered here, dear brothers and sisters, heirs of a long and beautiful holy history in France, I say to you: draw, in your turn, from that source which is the pierced Heart of Jesus."
