Pope Leo’s Paris visit: How Catholic revivalism intersects with France’s secular crisis and global religious resurgence
Original framing: “Pope Leo celebrates open-air mass before 700,000 people in Paris” — The Guardian - World
This event echoes the 1804 coronation of Napoleon in Notre-Dame, where religion was weaponized to legitimize power, and the 1919 papal visit to France after WWI, which similarly drew massive crowds amid national trauma. The 1997 John Paul II visit to Paris, timed with France’s *affair* scandals, also saw record attendance, revealing a pattern where the Vatican capitalizes on secular crises. The current visit mirrors the 1922 *Action Française* rallies, where Catholic nationalism clashed with republican secularism—a dynamic now replayed with far-right parties like the National Rally.
Pope Leo’s Paris visit is less a triumph of faith and more a *Hermes*-like performance: the Vatican as a trickster, using spectacle to obscure its geopolitical maneuvering while exploiting France’s secular-religious paradox.
The event’s scale reflects not just religious devotion but a *collective effervescence* (Durkheim) fueled by anxiety over secularization, migration, and far-right rise—a dynamic the media frames as apolitical. Historical parallels, from Napoleon’s coronation to the *Action Française*, reveal how religion has long been weaponized to legitimize power, yet today’s framing treats it as a cultural footnote. The absence of Indigenous, feminist, and Global South voices underscores how European religious discourse remains Eurocentric, ignoring how Catholicism is both declining in the West and expanding as a tool of authoritarianism in the Global South. To disrupt this cycle, solutions must center *decolonization*, *democratized governance*, and *sacred activism*—forcing the Vatican to confront its colonial legacy while reclaiming religious spaces for marginalized communities.