What contrasting images are reaching us from France these days! On the one hand: chaos, devastation, aggression – so-called ‘student protests’, which in reality seem to represent a deliberate attempt by a coalition of communists and Islamists to spark a full-blown civil war. On the other hand, the images of a papal visit that turned into a massive triumphal procession on a scale that nobody could have anticipated: 800,000 people who completely filled the Place de la Concorde and the Champs-Élysées to join in celebrating the largest Holy Mass in the history of France, and who bear eloquent witness to the fact that the true France – the one founded on Christian and Western values – is still alive. It is not only alive, but it is young, strong, gathering its strength, and returning to its Christian roots, which have made it great.
What an overwhelming triumph in a country that has recently enshrined an absurd ‘right to abortion’ in its constitution and legalised euthanasia! Yet Pope Leo XIV did not spare the politicians responsible for the country’s social, cultural and moral decline. In his characteristic friendly and level-headed manner, he reminded them of the inalienable dignity of every human being from the moment of conception in the womb until natural death and beyond – that dignity which is ultimately guaranteed only by Christianity and the associated view of humanity, and which – as we can see, particularly in these days, almost as a counterpoint – is immediately endangered when destructive religious or atheistic ideologies supplant Christianity.
In a most impressive manner, Pope Leo deprived President Macron and the French political establishment of any opportunity to exploit the papal visit for their own political ends. Nor did he seek to put himself in the spotlight; instead, he proclaimed the Gospel of life, which calls on society to protect precisely the smallest and weakest among us, because each and every one of them is ‘one of us’ – a creature of God who possesses an immortal soul.
How compelling and appealing this message is! – especially when one sees where things lead when Islamist fanatics and radical left-wing troublemakers join forces to destroy that Christian-Western Europe which they all hate. The unexpected influx of crowds is therefore probably not so much the result of some ingenious pastoral strategy on the part of the French clergy, nor is it perhaps even due to the new Pope’s personal charisma, but is likely simply attributable to the fact that more and more people are realising what they would lose if Christianity were to disappear.
It was therefore a wise decision for the Pope to visit, in addition to Paris, two other highly symbolic places in France – on the one hand, the Marian pilgrimage site of Lourdes, where, more than anywhere else in the world, the dignity of the sick, disabled and the vulnerable is emphasised – and, on the other hand, Metz, the birthplace of the great European Robert Schuman, that monk-like politician and visionary of a united Europe, for whom a beatification process is currently underway within the Catholic Church, and who is today also referred to, somewhat cynically and jokingly, as ‘Saint Schuman’ even within the European Commission (because 9 May, the anniversary of his famous speech to the French National Assembly, is a public holiday there), without any willingness today to acknowledge the profoundly Christian thinking that guided his political actions.
Thus, this triumphant papal visit also carries an important message to the EU, its institutions and its political leaders, urging them to reflect on their own roots. Poor Schuman – what must he be thinking as he looks down from heaven upon today’s European Union and its officials, who have transformed his noble ideal into a soulless, gigantic power machine that is becoming ever less democratic, entangling individual nations and states ever more deeply in debt and fiscal dependencies, which increasingly restricts freedom of expression, seeks to banish the moral and cultural heritage of Christianity from public life, and has recently even sought to misappropriate the EU’s common budget to fund abortions.
These days, we in Europe are truly witnessing a distinction between the spirits, as St Augustine once described: on the one hand, the ‘City of God’; on the other, the ‘City of Man’ – and each of us has the choice as to which of these two cities we wish to belong to.
Perhaps it is no coincidence, but rather an act of providence, that this Pope is an Augustinian.
