Distinction Without Exclusion: What the Church Teaches About Secularity When the Pope Comes to Paris

About 800,000 people filled the Place de la Concorde on Saturday for Mass with Pope Leo XIV, on the square where the Revolution set up its guillotine and where the Republic holds its Bastille Day celebrations. The president of that Republic stayed away. A day earlier, in his own palace, the Pope had told him what the Church thinks secularity is for, and why it can’t mean shutting the moral law out of French law. The Church’s teaching on this is precise, and it is friendlier to a secular state than most secularists assume.

The News Story

Pope Leo XIV celebrated an open-air Mass on the Place de la Concorde in Paris on Saturday, September 26, before a crowd the Vatican estimated at 800,000, about 200,000 more than had registered in advance. The German Press Agency reported that the figure came from French authorities. The pope rode about 1.2 miles along the Champs-Élysées in the popemobile before the Mass. A wide security cordon closed central Paris to traffic, and the entrances to the square were full hours before the 3 p.m. start. The Associated Press compared the crowds to those that filled the avenue after France’s World Cup wins in 1998 and 2018.¹

Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu and National Rally leader Marine Le Pen attended, as did Brigitte Macron. President Emmanuel Macron did not, an absence attributed to France’s strict separation of church and state. Supporters of that separation, known as laïcité and grounded in a 1905 law, had criticized the choice of the square, a revolutionary execution site where Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were guillotined and where Bastille Day celebrations are held.²

In his homily, Leo urged Catholics to share their faith rather than keep it to themselves: “Let it overflow, so that those you meet may be refreshed and their thirst satisfied.” He asked whether people content themselves “with material goods, with instant gratification, with the many little idols that promise us the world but leave our hearts empty.” He left for the Marian shrine at Lourdes that evening.³

The Mass followed a Friday address at the Élysée Palace, where Leo spoke to Macron, government officials and diplomats. He said, “The protection of the right to life constitutes the indispensable foundation of every other human right.” He said he was concerned by trends 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 also argued that “authentic secularity” does not consist “in excluding religion from the public sphere or from education,” and defended the place of Catholic schools in France.⁴

France’s National Assembly gave final approval on July 15 to a law creating a right to assisted dying for adults with incurable illnesses in an advanced or terminal phase, by a vote of 291 to 241. The Senate, where the conservative right holds a majority, had voted against it, but the lower house has the final word. The Constitutional Council upheld the law on August 14. France enshrined the right to abortion in its constitution in 2024. The French Catholic hierarchy opposed both measures.⁵

At the Élysée and later at UNESCO headquarters, Leo also called nuclear deterrence a “mistaken belief” that is fueling a new arms race, and said, “Peace is not a balance of power; rather, it is built day by day through dialogue and justice.” He warned against losing humanity amid a “paradise of machines,” a phrase he took from the French novelist Georges Bernanos, and called for “education in ethical discernment.” Macron, in his own remarks, described laïcité as the framework that guarantees freedom of conscience.⁶

The visit is the first by a pope to Paris since Benedict XVI in 2008. Pope Francis declined repeated invitations to make a state visit. France recorded 13,000 adult baptisms this year, triple the 2016 figure, according to the French bishops, while total baptisms fell from 513,000 in 1980 to 186,000 in 2024. Leo is scheduled to celebrate Mass at Lourdes on Sunday and to speak on Europe in Metz on Monday.⁷

Catholic Social Teaching Analysis

Two Meanings of One French Word

Our analysis starts with an absence. Emmanuel Macron received Leo XIV at the Élysée on Friday, thanked him warmly, and then stayed away from a crowd that rivaled France’s World Cup celebrations, an absence attributed to the country’s strict separation of church and state. Some defenders of laïcité went further and objected to holding the Mass on the Concorde at all, since the square belongs to the Republic.

Leo had already given his answer, in Macron’s own palace. “An authentic secularity,” he said, “consists not in excluding religion from the public sphere or from education, but in striving to ensure that the State and religious institutions maintain dialogue and join forces in the service of the common good.”⁸

So two meanings of the same word stood on the Concorde this weekend. The first treats faith as a private matter the public square needs protecting from. The second treats the public square as the place where believers and unbelievers argue about the common good in the open, each giving his reasons. The Church holds the second, and she holds it more firmly than her critics tend to expect.

The Church Wanted the Distinction

Start with what the Church concedes, because it’s a lot. The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church says the distinction between the political and religious spheres “is a value that has been attained and recognized by the Catholic Church and belongs to the inheritance of contemporary civilization.”⁹ The Second Vatican Council put it plainly: “The Church and the political community in their own fields are autonomous and independent from each other.”¹⁰ And the Church, the Compendium adds, “is not entitled to express preferences for this or that institutional or constitutional solution.”¹¹

That is a real renunciation, and she means it. She wants no bishops in the cabinet and no party wearing a papal blessing. France learned at great cost what a tangle of throne and altar does to both, and the Church learned it too. So a Catholic can grant the president his point. If Macron judged that a head of state at a papal Mass would blur a line his office exists to keep, he made a defensible call, and the Church has no quarrel with the line itself.

Autonomy from the Church, Never from the Moral Law

Here the Compendium draws its own line, in the same paragraph that praised the distinction. Catholic teaching “clearly rejects the prospects of an autonomy that is understood as independence from the moral law.” A rightly autonomous state respects “the truths that derive from natural knowledge regarding man’s life in society, even if such truths may also be taught by a specific religion, because truth is one.” And the Compendium names who may carry those truths into public argument: “A sincere quest for the truth, using legitimate means to promote and defend the moral truths concerning social life … is a right and duty of all members of a social and political community.”¹²

Because truth is one. That clause carries the whole argument. A moral claim stays a claim about reason when a Church happens to teach it too.

St. Thomas Aquinas shows how this works, and he uses the very example France has spent years arguing over. Every human law, he writes, “has just so much of the nature of law, as it is derived from the law of nature,” and a law that “deflects from the law of nature” is “no longer a law but a perversion of law.” His example of a law drawn from nature by strict reasoning is this one: “that ‘one must not kill’ may be derived as a conclusion from the principle that ‘one should do harm to no man.’” Laws of that kind, he says, “have some force from the natural law also.”¹³ The prohibition on killing belongs to reason before it belongs to any creed.

That’s why the Church can say, plainly, what she says about the law the National Assembly passed in July. The Catechism: “Whatever its motives and means, direct euthanasia consists in putting an end to the lives of handicapped, sick, or dying persons. It is morally unacceptable.”¹⁴ When the French bishops opposed that law, and when a Pope told the Élysée that “the protection of the right to life constitutes the indispensable foundation of every other human right,”¹⁵ they argued from premises any citizen can examine. Nobody was asked to recite the Creed first.

A word of care belongs here. Many people who wanted this law watched someone they loved suffer badly at the end, and the Church has no business sneering at that grief. Leo didn’t. He praised the Catholic caregivers who “accompany our brothers and sisters in their sufferings,” and he spoke of a fraternity that teaches us “to support frailty with loving care, to accompany every stage of life with respect and mutual trust.”¹⁶ That’s the Church’s answer to suffering, and she runs a good share of the places where it happens.

Secular Intolerance

The Compendium also names what happens when secularity loses its nerve. A state’s respect for religion, it says, “assures the free exercise of ritual, spiritual, cultural and charitable activities by communities of believers,” and then it gives the best one-line definition of healthy secularity I know: “In a pluralistic society, secularity is a place for communication between the different spiritual traditions and the nation.” It goes on to warn of “expressions of secular intolerance that are hostile to granting any kind of political or cultural relevance to religious faiths,” an intolerance that “seeks to exclude the activity of Christians from the social and political spheres.”¹⁷

A place for communication. The complaint about the Concorde runs the opposite direction, as though a square that belongs to everyone had to be kept clear of the country’s largest religious community for a Saturday afternoon. Leo answered that worry on Friday. A Christian in public life who follows a conscience formed by faith, he said, “cannot be considered a proselytizer or a threat to the unity of the nation.”¹⁸

In fairness, Macron’s own account of laïcité on Friday sat close to Leo’s. He described it as the framework that guarantees freedom of conscience, and a Catholic can sign that sentence. The Pope then closed his address by quoting the president back to himself, from a 2018 speech to the French bishops: “a Church that claims to be uninterested in temporal matters would not be fulfilling her vocation; and that a President of the Republic who claims to be uninterested in the Church and in Catholics would be failing in his duty.”¹⁹ The Pope agreed with the president. That’s worth noticing.

Separation That Cooperates

The Compendium’s last word on this subject could hang in any French classroom: “The mutual autonomy of the Church and the political community does not entail a separation that excludes cooperation.” Both, it says, “serve the personal and social vocation of the same human beings.”²⁰ Leo named the cases on Friday: Catholic schools, the charities that support Christians in the Middle East, the Catholic institutions where caregivers sit with the dying.

That last one will be tested first. A law permitting assisted death presses on every Catholic hospice and every Catholic nurse in France. A secularity that is really “a place for communication” leaves them free to decline and keep caring for the patient in the bed. That freedom is the practical measure of which meaning of laïcité France chooses.

What I’d Watch

Watch Metz on Monday, where Leo speaks in English on the roots of Europe. Watch the conscience protections as the assisted dying law takes effect, because that is where the two meanings of laïcité meet in a hospital corridor. And pray for France: for the 13,000 adults baptized there this year, for the sick who will be offered a lethal prescription and need someone to sit with them, and for a president in his last months who said in 2018 that he couldn’t be uninterested in the Church. On Saturday, 800,000 people gave him a reason to mean it.

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This story turns on the Church’s teaching on legitimate secularity: the political community and the Church are distinct and autonomous, and that distinction leaves believers, and the moral law, free to speak in public.

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Notes

1. ↑ Nicole Winfield, Samuel Petrequin, Sylvie Corbet and John Leicester, “Pope Leo draws 800,000 people to central Paris for open-air Mass on iconic square,” Associated Press via PBS News, September 26, 2026, pbs.org; Christoph Sator, Rachel Sommer and Michael Evers, “Leo XIV draws 800,000 to open-air Mass on Paris’ Place de la Concorde,” German Press Agency via The Spokesman-Review, September 26, 2026, spokesman.com; Jasmine Baehr, “Pope Leo draws staggering 800,000 faithful to heart of Paris for massive outdoor Mass,” Fox News, September 26, 2026, foxnews.com.
2. ↑ Sator, Sommer and Evers, “Leo XIV draws 800,000”; Winfield et al., “Pope Leo draws 800,000 people”; Baehr, “Pope Leo draws staggering 800,000.”
3. ↑ Winfield et al., “Pope Leo draws 800,000 people”; Sator, Sommer and Evers, “Leo XIV draws 800,000”; Baehr, “Pope Leo draws staggering 800,000.”
4. ↑ Pope Leo XIV, Address to the Authorities, Civil Society and the Diplomatic Corps (Élysée Palace, Paris, September 25, 2026), vatican.va; Laure Valentin, “Emmanuel Macron and Pope Leo XIV set out clashing world views at first meeting in France,” Euronews, September 25, 2026, euronews.com.
5. ↑ “French Parliament approves landmark assisted-dying bill,” Al Jazeera, July 15, 2026, aljazeera.com; “France upholds assisted dying law but strikes down social media ban for children,” Euronews, August 14, 2026, euronews.com; Nicole Winfield, Sylvie Corbet and John Leicester, “Pope opens France trip with warning that a ‘paradise of machines’ could undermine humanity,” Associated Press via PBS News, September 25, 2026, pbs.org.
6. ↑ Winfield, Corbet and Leicester, “Pope opens France trip”; Pope Leo XIV, Address at the Élysée Palace; Valentin, “Emmanuel Macron and Pope Leo XIV.”
7. ↑ Winfield, Corbet and Leicester, “Pope opens France trip”; Winfield et al., “Pope Leo draws 800,000 people”; Sator, Sommer and Evers, “Leo XIV draws 800,000”; Valentin, “Emmanuel Macron and Pope Leo XIV.”
8. ↑ Pope Leo XIV, Address at the Élysée Palace.
9. ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004), no. 571, vatican.va.
10. ↑ Second Vatican Council, Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes (December 7, 1965), no. 76, vatican.va.
11. ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium, no. 424.
12. ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium, no. 571.
13. ↑ Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 95, a. 2, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, in New Advent, newadvent.org.
14. ↑ Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), no. 2277, vatican.va.
15. ↑ Pope Leo XIV, Address at the Élysée Palace.
16. ↑ Pope Leo XIV, Address at the Élysée Palace.
17. ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium, no. 572.
18. ↑ Pope Leo XIV, Address at the Élysée Palace.
19. ↑ Valentin, “Emmanuel Macron and Pope Leo XIV”; Pope Leo XIV, Address at the Élysée Palace, quoting Emmanuel Macron, Address to the Bishops of France (Collège des Bernardins, Paris, April 9, 2018).
20. ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium, no. 425.

Books Cited

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• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Latin-English edition, Complete Set (Aquinas Institute / Emmaus Academic, 2012)
• Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition (Doubleday / Image, 2003)