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Pope Leo XIV in France – Is a Catholic Revival Beginning? | Your Big Questions Answered · Regina UNSCRIPTED

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: I think we can now say that this apostolic journey to France was a triumph for Pope Leo XIV.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: It seemed to hit all the right notes, combining warmth and humility with a remarkable clarity about Christ, the dignity of human life, and the church's rightful place in public life.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: He even appears to have made a personal impression on President Macron, who rearranged his schedule to attend the concluding Mass in Metz, reportedly wishing to continue their productive dialogue.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: And his message has broken through into the secular news cycle, with the independent among others reporting his condemnation of assisted dying as false compassion.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: For those of us who followed these extraordinary days, there was so much to celebrate.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: The enthusiasm of the young, the immense gatherings for worship, and particularly close to my own heart, the sight of the Holy Father kneeling before Our Lady at Lourdes.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: So come with me now as we retrace his journey through Paris, Lourdes and Metz, meet the people whose lives he touched, and consider what he said to France, to the church, and to a world that desperately needs the hope he came to proclaim.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: For a moment, the Stade de France looked like a stadium welcoming a celebrity.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: There were lights, songs, and young people calling out the name of the man in white as he made his way through the crowd.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: It would have been very easy to watch a few seconds of that footage and say that France had been swept up in the excitement of the papal visit.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: But then the cross and the holy tunic of Argentur were placed before them, and the whole stadium fell silent.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: The cheering was real, so was the prayer.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: Something deeper than celebrity had brought these young people there.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: Over four days, from 25th to the 28th of September, Pope Leo XIV travelled from Paris to Lude and finally to Metz.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: He spoke to the French president, to diplomats, and the world of culture.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: He addressed priests, bishops, and young people.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: He celebrated Mass before a vast crowd in the heart of Paris.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: He knelt before Our Lady at Massabiel.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: And in the east of France, he asked Europe what kind of peace it hopes to build.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: The visit had political consequences, certainly, but its centre was the proclamation of Jesus Christ to a nation often told that faith belongs safely in their past.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: I want to take you through the journey as it unfolded, because individual clips cannot quite convey the force of the whole.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: Leo did not arrive with an instruction to Catholics to retreat into private devotion, nor did he arrive simply to congratulate France on its cathedrals.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, he invited her to ask whether the faith that helped make her civilization might still be true and whether she might need it now more than she cares to admit.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: To understand why those images were so striking, we need to remember the complicated relationship between France and the church.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: France is called the eldest daughter of the church, a title recalling the baptism of Clovis, and a Christian inheritance that shaped her monarchy, her villages, her universities, her art, and a remarkable company of saints.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: France gave the world cathedrals and monasteries, theologians and missionaries, Saint Vincent de Paul and Saint Therese of Lisieux.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: It also gave us Lud, a place to which millions have come in search of healing, repentance, and hope.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yet modern France is also the country of the revolution and of les cité, the principle of the secular republic.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: The revolution was not one simple event, nor is every form of secular government hostile to faith.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: But revolutionary measures against the church, followed by later struggles over schools, religious orders, and public authority, left a real historical wound.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: The 1905 law separating church and state became a landmark in the Republican settlement.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: In principle, the state's neutrality can protect freedom of conscience and worship for everyone.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: In practice, l'écite can also be interpreted as though religion ought to disappear from public argument, from public education, and even from visible civic life.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: That is the fundamental tension.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: The church does not claim that a bishop should govern France.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: She does claim that the gospel has something to say about the human person, about life and death, about justice, about the family, education and peace.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: If a secular state asks Christians to keep those convictions inside a church building while public policy proceeds on contrary assumptions, it is asking them to divide their consciences in two.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: For Catholics, that is impossible.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: Faith cannot be reduced to a private taste when it bears down on the dignity of every human person.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: We should resist an easy caricature here.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: The French Republic is not a single hostile personality, and secular French people are not all enemies of the Church.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: There are French Catholics living their faith openly.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: There are citizens of no faith who defend religious liberty, and there are genuine opportunities for cooperation.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: Equally, the church has reasons to acknowledge her own failures.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: Above all, the grievous betrayal of those abused by people who should have protected them.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: A credible Christian voice has to tell the truth about that as well.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: This visit was powerful precisely because Leo sought a public place for the church without pretending her witness was above accountability.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: And France, for all the statistics of religious decline, still carries a memory of Christianity in its very landscape.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: A cathedral rebuilt after fire.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: Leo's first major address before President Emmanuel Macron, civil authorities and diplomats at the Elysee Paris was warm towards France and entirely serious about the questions facing her.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: He recalled her Christian roots from Saint Irenaeus and Clovis onwards and praised the restoration of Notre Dame.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: Its reopening for worship was more than a feat of architecture.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: For Leo, something thought destroyed had been brought back to life by shared effort, offering the nation a visible sign of hope.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: He then took Francis' famous words, liberte, egalite, and fraternite, and argued that they are ethical demands to which the gospel offers an inexhaustible source of inspiration.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: This was a courteous address to the Republic, but courtesy should not be confused with surrender.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: He questioned a society that turns science into a commercial venture and treats genetic manipulation, surrogacy, the trade in organs, or an arranged death as possibilities to be managed rather than as warnings about what happens when technical power outruns moral wisdom.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: His defense of life was not an isolated objection to one piece of legislation.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: It arose from a view of the human person as possessing a worth that neither the market nor the state can confer or take away.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: Most directly, he addressed Laicite, a Christian in public service acting according to a conscience formed by faith, should not automatically be treated as a threat to the republic.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: Genuine secularity, he argued, does not exclude religion from public life or education.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: Church and state have distinct roles, yet they can speak to one another and work for the common good.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: I think that matters far beyond France.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: We are often told that religious freedom means permission to worship, provided that faith never shapes a public judgment.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: Pope Leo challenged that impoverished understanding of freedom at the very beginning of his visit.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: He also spoke of war and the arms race, rejecting the idea that nuclear weapons alone guarantee security.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: His concern for the unborn child, the person approaching death, and the civilian caught in war came from the same conviction.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: Human beings cannot be made expendable to serve a more powerful person's ends.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: France, he urged, could be a champion of dialogue and peace.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: The political leaders in that room heard a Pope willing to cooperate with the Republic and equally willing to say where its morals' assumptions needed to be challenged.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: At UNESCO later that day, Leo brought a question that connected much of the journey.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: What does it mean to be human?
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: Education, science, and culture are good things, and the church has contributed richly to all three.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: But education becomes thin if it cannot ask what life means.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: Science can help us care for our neighbour.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: It can also become an instrument of destruction if knowledge is separated from wisdom.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: Technology can free us to do great good.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: It can also tempt us to treat people as problems for an algorithm to solve.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: Leo's address was much more than an argument about artificial intelligence, though that was part of it.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: He began from the ordinary fact that each of us came into the world as a child, dependent on others for food, words, affection, and care.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: Before we achieve anything, we have received life.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: Before we claim independence, we have depended upon someone's love.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: If we forget that beginning, we begin to think of life as a product to be controlled, and of the vulnerable person as a burden.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: The question of AI, therefore, is a question about us.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: Will our tools serve human freedom and dignity?
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: Or will we quietly adopt the machine's idea of what is useful?
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: There was a beautiful continuity between that address and the Pope's Vespers at Notre Dame.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: This was the cathedral whose burning had shocked the world and whose rebuilding had moved even those with little religious faith.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: Its stone and timber had been restored.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: Leo now stood among the clergy and faithful whose vocation is to fill it with prayer.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: France needs living Christians as much as restored Christian monuments.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_00: Its inheritance is not complete when the scaffolding comes down.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: The cathedral reaches its purpose when a people gather there to worship God and are sent out to serve him in the world.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know about you, but I found this imagery of the Pope entering the Stade de France very encouraging indeed.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: It was amazing to see so many young people turn up to welcome the Holy Father.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: Were they welcoming Robert Prevost?
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: Is that why they were there?
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think so.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_00: I think they were there because this was the successor of Peter, the leader of Catholics throughout the world.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: Their welcome was exhilarating, but Leo was not there to build a following for himself.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: One young woman, Chloe, asked how Catholics could proclaim Christ with courage in a society often indifferent to God, while remaining sensitive and fraternal towards those who did not share their faith.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: It was exactly the question the entire visit was confronting.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: The Pope thanked those young people for their courage and their faith and called them the saints of France.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: He took St.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: Paul's words, for me to live is Christ as the heart of life, rather than a decorative motto.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: France might be indifferent to the question of God, he observed, but God is not indifferent to us, and indifference to God has a way of becoming indifference to the human person.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: That connection ran from his address at UNESCO to his conversations with the young.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: If we lose sight of who created us and loves us, it becomes harder to recognize why the weakest amongst us matters.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: Pope Leo did not speak to these young people as though they lived in an imaginary Catholic France, untouched by anxiety.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: He acknowledged fatigue with screens, uncertainty about the future and the wounds of their generation.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: His answer was prayer and service, adoration and action, silence away from the noise of media and courageous proclamation.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_00: He called those discerning priesthood or consecrated life to trust Christ and remembered them that the church in France needs them.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: This was a demanding invitation.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: It offered them a purpose substantial enough to withstand fear.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: Then the atmosphere changed.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: The cross and holy tunic were brought before the stadium, and the cheering yielded to contemplation.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: I find that silence at least as eloquent as the applause.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_00: A secular society can still gather tens of thousands to acclaim a visitor, but here they were being invited to look beyond the visitor to the suffering and love of Jesus Christ.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: Their enthusiasm had led them to a question about the cross.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: We should be careful not to announce a national revival on the basis of one extraordinary evening.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: The work of conversion and perseverance is much slower than that.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: But neither should we explain away what happened before our eyes.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: In one of the great public spaces of secular France, young people here knelt in the presence of the mystery at the center of the Christian faith.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: Saturday began at Maison Bakita, a center that helps people who have arrived in France find support and a place in society.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: It was a reminder that the church's defense of human dignity has to acquire hands and feet.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: Real people need welcome, accompaniment, and practical help.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_00: The meeting need not be turned into a slogan about every contested migration policy.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: Its immediate meaning was simpler and more challenging.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: The stranger is a person to whom we have obligations, and Christians must put their words about dignity into practice.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_00: At the Catholic Institute of Paris, Leo met with members of a synodal assembly alongside catechumens and newly baptized Catholics.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_00: Here, the secularization story became more complicated.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: Adults are approaching the church, asking for baptism and taking the gospel seriously, sometimes in a society that has ceased to expect them.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_00: Leo described this as a work of grace that exceeds sociological predictions, but he was alert to a real pastoral question.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: What happens after the moving experience of baptism when the new Christian goes home and the ordinary struggle to live the faith begins?
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: His answer deserves to be heard in parishes across the world.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I know this is something that we experience in our own parish.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_00: Indeed, people who have recently gone through the RCIA process, locally to me, have asked exactly this question.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_00: We need to welcome the person who comes to the church, certainly.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_00: Them teach, accompany, and integrate them, help them to know scripture and doctrine, to enter the moral life, take part in the liturgy, and build real friendships in a worshipping community.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_00: Pope Leo insisted that the liturgy does not merely follow catechesis as an attractive illustration, it makes present Christ's paschal mystery, and can itself draw a person into conversion.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_00: Those words are a serious challenge to every parish where someone is baptized at Easter and barely seen again by summer.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_00: Later, at the Place de la Concorde, the scale of the visit became impossible to miss.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_00: An immense public congregation assembled for mass in the middle of Paris.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_00: The location itself carried a history of French political upheaval.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_00: On this day it became the setting for worship, but the homily's heart was not a contest over public space.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_00: Leo spoke about thirst, the desire in every human heart for happiness, truth, love, and fulfillment, and about Jesus Christ as the living water who alone can answer it.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_00: That was a striking way to address a modern capital.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_00: People can be surrounded by choices and still feel that that is something essential is missing.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_00: We can accumulate experiences, work harder, acquire more stuff, fill every quiet moment with distraction, and still ask what our lives are for.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_00: Pope Leo took that common restlessness seriously.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_00: He didn't tell the crowd simply to be proud of a Catholic past.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_00: He told them that Christ is alive and offers the life for which they thirst.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_00: From the altar in the heart of Paris, the invitation was addressed not only to regular churchgoers, but to anyone who had begun to suspect that material success is too small an answer to the deepest question of the human heart.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_00: The crowds were a wonderful sign, but they are an invitation to the church as well.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_00: Can we welcome the person who comes out of curiosity?
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_00: Can we tell him plainly who Jesus Christ is?
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_00: Can we help her find a parish where that initial interest grows into a full sacramental life, friendship, service, and prayer?
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_00: If the Place de la Concorde showed how many people could gather, the encounter with the catechumans showed the patient work needed once they had gone home.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_00: On Saturday evening, Pope Leo arrived at Lourdes, and the pace of the journey changed significantly.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_00: He went to the grotto of Massabiel and knelt before the image of Our Lady.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_00: And this is a place so familiar to me.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_00: You can see here the Pope crossing over a bridge into the sanctuary, a bridge that I've crossed many times myself.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's a very personal image for me, I have to say, and uh really does touch my heart.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_00: Here we see the statue of Our Lady that you pray at if you want to return to Ludd, right in the domain there.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_00: Amazing to see the Pope Mobile travelling down that part of the sanctuary where um the torchlight procession takes place every night.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_00: For many, that was a lovely image of Pope Leo at a famous shrine.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_00: For me, it was intensely personal.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis is woven through the story of my own family.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_00: It's where I met my wife, and a few years later, it was there that she told me she was expecting our first son, William.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_00: We returned as our family grew, bringing our children up and placing our joys, our hopes, and in time our sorrows before our lady.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_00: I've knelt in that place carrying emotions for which words were wholly inadequate, and to see the successor of Peter kneeling on those same stones seemed to bring those years together in a single moment of prayer.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_00: I suspect many pilgrims know exactly what I'm talking about here, even if their stories are very different from mine.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_00: Lourd is a place where we arrive with the things we cannot put neatly into a sentence.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_00: Some come hoping for physical healing.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_00: Many come with a grief that has no quick remedy.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_00: Others come in thanksgiving or simply to ask whether God sees them.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_00: At the grotto, the mighty and the forgotten kneel on the same ground.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_00: And that is one of the reasons this stop belonged at the center of the Pope's journey.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: It revealed what his speeches about human dignity looked like in the life of the church.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_00: At Sunday Mass on the Prairie, Leo did not reduce Lourd to consolation without conversion.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_00: He recalled Our Lady's call through Saint Bernadette to repentance and the urgent invitation of Christ to turn towards life.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_00: Mary's promise to Bernadette was not that.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: Every sorrow would be removed in this world.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_00: It pointed to the next and the happiness that she would find there.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_00: At a time when we often struggle to think beyond health, comfort, and material progress, Pope Leo here restored the horizon of eternity.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_00: Hope is not a claim that suffering does not hurt, it rests on Christ's death and resurrection, which future suffering cannot finally destroy.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_00: He also said something that needs to be heard very clearly while France debates the end of life.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_00: Louis is a place where the crutch, the wheelchair, and the hidden tear do not diminish anybody's welcome.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_00: Human life does not become less sacred when a person grows weak or dependent.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_00: That teaching is persuasive here because it has a visible form.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_00: A volunteer pushing a wheelchair, a nurse listening to a patient, a priest hearing a confession, a stranger making room for another pilgrim.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_00: The church is at her most credible when her care for the vulnerable lives can be actually seen.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_00: Later, speaking to sick people and staff who care for them at the AQL Notre Dame, Leo made his opposition to euthanasia and assisted suicide unmistakable.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_00: A person's dignity, he said, does not depend on a lawmaker's permission or a measure of strength.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_00: What is legal is not necessarily moral.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_00: Healthcare exists to care for a suffering person, not to eliminate the person who suffers.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_00: He urged better palliative care and research, as well as the tenderness shown every day by doctors, nurses, stretcher bearers, chaplains, and volunteers at Lourd.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_00: And to those who were ill, he said with beautiful directness that they were not a burden.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_00: We must not speak lightly of pain, nor pretend that a family watching someone suffer faces easy choices.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_00: Leo's argument was strong because he did not offer them an abstraction.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_00: He stood among the sick and those who care for them.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_00: He asked France to extend the kind of care visible at Lourdes rather than make an arranged death appear to be the humane answer to abandonment or fear.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_00: For Catholics in every country facing similar legislation, that is a vital distinction.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_00: Compassion remains at the bedside.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_00: It does not decide that the patient's life has ceased to be worth living.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_00: Earlier that Sunday, Leo had given the French bishops one of the journey's most consequential addresses.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_00: At Lourdes, he recalled an old title for their country, the Kingdom of Mary, and the consecration of France to Our Lady in 1638.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_00: He remembered Notre Dame and France's long Catholic history, but he did not treat that history as a museum collection.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_00: He told the bishops to be courageous, to acknowledge failings truthfully, bind up wounds, and never grow weary of proclaiming the gospel.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_00: Most forcefully, he insisted that the church has every right to be heard in the public square.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_00: Even where her teaching is unpopular, her voice is needed.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_00: He commended the bishop's witness during the end-of-life debates, and he urged them to defend the church's freedom to evangelize, educate, and worship publicly.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_00: Charity, he said, in effect, must be visible as charity done in the name of Jesus Christ.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_00: Here was the answer to the false choice with which we began.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_00: A republic may have its proper independence, and Catholics may be loyal citizens.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_00: Neither fact requires the Church to fall silent about the gospel or about the protection of life.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_00: There was an equally necessary word about the Church's own wounds.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_00: Leo called the bishops to acknowledge failures and bind up wounds.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_00: During the Lord visit, he also met survivors of clerical sexual abuse privately.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_00: I cannot treat that encounter as a convenient scene of closure because justice, truth, and reparation cannot be completed by a papal visit.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_00: But it matters to the integrity of this account.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_00: The church that insists on the dignity of the vulnerable must listen and act when those entrusted to her have been harmed.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_00: The mission Leo urged upon the bishops demands both courage before the world and honesty within the church.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_00: That night, candles moved through the darkness as pilgrims prayed the rosary.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_00: The Pope spoke of Mary's Immaculate Conception as a sign of what Christ's passion and resurrection can accomplish.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_00: She was not offered as an alternative to her son.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_00: She leads us to him.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_00: Looking at the thousands of lights, I thought about what Leo had said throughout the day that suffering need not have the last word, that the weakest person is loved, that France still has a Christian vocation.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_00: A candle is a small light.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_00: There were thousands of them because individual acts of prayer, fidelity, and care can make the difference, it can make the darkness look completely different.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_00: On Monday, Leo travelled to Metz, a city in a borderland that knows how painfully nations can fight and how patiently they can reconcile.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_00: There he met representatives of other religious traditions and spoke of friendship and peace.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_00: Catholics can cooperate with their neighbours without claiming that all religions teach the same truths, or that Christ is merely one path among many.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_00: Indeed, Leo said that dialogue should express one's identity with simplicity and truth.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_00: The Church's confidence in Jesus Christ makes honest encounter possible.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_00: It does not require us to dissolve the gospel into a vague agreement.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_00: At the Robert Schumann Centre, Leo turned to Europe.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_00: Schumann, a committed Catholic who helped share European reconciliation after the devastation of war, was rooted in this region.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_00: The Pope asked his audience to remember the moral and Christian sources of Europe's project and to think beyond the idea that peace means only a temporary balance of forces.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_00: He praised patient negotiation, fidelity to international agreements, and the slow construction of solidarity.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_00: He also rejected naive pacifism.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_00: Dangers are real and peace requires constructive effort.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yet he warned against imagining that rearmament by itself can produce security.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_00: Europe's task is harder than preparing for the next conflict.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_00: It is to make reconciliation durable.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_00: The themes of the journey met here.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_00: A continent that forgets what a person is will struggle to decide what its technology is for.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_00: A society that treats dependence as humiliation will struggle to care for its sick.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_00: Nations that lose the habit of keeping their word will find peace increasingly fragile.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_00: And a church ashamed of publicly naming Christ will have difficulty offering the very hope Europe needs.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_00: Leo's argument was not that every political problem has an easy religious solution.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_00: It was that politics cannot remain humane if it becomes indifferent to truth, conscience, and the dignity of the human person.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_00: The final Mass in St.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_00: Stephen's Cathedral gave that argument its Christian shape.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_00: Leo spoke of a desert, a garden and a house, of simplicity and justice, of the flowering of a righteous life, and of a peace that requires human beings to build together under God's grace.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_00: In that city, marked by wars and shifting borders, he preached Christ's difficult command to refuse vengeance and to seek reconciliation.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_00: He drew attention to the cathedral's stained glass, where light passes through different colours to create a single work of beauty.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_00: It was a fitting image of a Europe whose peoples need neither enmity nor an imposed sameness, but a peace in which they can live together without forgetting who they really are.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_00: As the Mass ended, Leo appeared deeply moved.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_00: He had begun his journey speaking to the authorities of France.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_00: He concluded it preaching the gospel of forgiveness.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_00: That was no retreat from public questions, it was his answer to their deepest roots.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_00: What then did this apostolic journey say?
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_00: To France's leaders, Leo said that faith has a rightful voice in public life and that a nation cannot protect human rights while forgetting the inviable worth of a human life.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_00: To educators, scientists, and those building new technologies, he asked them to remember the child each of us once was, and to place knowledge at the service of persons rather than power.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_00: To young people, he said that Christ calls them by name, that holiness is possible in France today, and that the church needs their courage.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_00: To the newly baptized and to parishes, he said that an awakening of faith must be welcomed, taught, and sustained.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_00: At Lourdes, he gave the suffering a place of honour, and he told France that compassion means care, presence, and the protection of life.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_00: He asked the bishops to preach without weariness and to defend the church's freedom while facing her own failures truthfully.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_00: At Metz, he asked Europe to remember the faith and moral convictions that helped bring former enemies into peace and to choose patient reconciliation over the fatalism of another arms race.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_00: Across those different audiences, the same question returned.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_00: Do we know what a human being is?
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_00: And are we prepared to live as though every one of us matters to God?
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_00: There is a reason to be joyful about this visit.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_00: There were crowds, of course, and moving images, but the deeper reason for hope is that the Pope did not leave those crowds with a celebration of their own enthusiasm.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_00: He pointed them towards the living Christ.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_00: In Paris, Christ was the answer to the human heart's thirst.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_00: In the stadium, his cross drew young people into silence.
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_00: At Lourd, his resurrection gave hope beyond the limits of suffering and death.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_00: At Metz, his command to forgive opened a road beyond inherited hostility.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, a few days cannot resolve every conflict between church and state, heal the church's wounds, defeat a law or reverse decades of secularisation.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_00: They can, however, awaken a people to possibilities they had stopped seeing.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_00: I think especially of Leo kneeling at the grotto.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_00: The Pope was not commanding history from a distance.
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_00: He was praying where generations of ordinary people have prayed, bringing France before our lady and through her to her son.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_00: That is where the journey's public arguments and its most private hopes met.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_00: The question now is what do we do with what we have seen?
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_00: In France, Catholics can speak without apology, receive the person who comes searching for God, care for the sick, and carry the gospel into the life of the nation.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_00: In our parishes elsewhere, we can do the same.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_00: France's faith is not merely an inheritance left in stone.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_00: It lives wherever someone hears the name of Jesus Christ, turns to him, and finds the courage to love his neighbour.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_00: That is the hope Leo brought to France.
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_00: It is