Pope Leo XIV arrived in France Friday for the first papal state visit in 18 years — and the itinerary reads less like a shepherd tending his flock than a diplomat running the globalist circuit: AI speeches at UNESCO, a tribute to a founding father of the European Union, and closed-door talks with a lame-duck French president. For the American working class footing the bill on every overseas commitment Washington makes, the question is simple: what stake is there in a religious leader cosplaying as a Eurocrat? None.
The four-day trip will draw over a million people to Paris and Lourdes, according to The Guardian, with half a million expected at a single Mass on the Champs-Élysées Saturday. But the crowds tell you more about cultural spectacle than spiritual vitality: only 5% of France's 69 million residents regularly attend Catholic Mass, down from 35% in 1960, as BBC reported. The Church attributes the turnout to "growing spiritual thirst among the French and other Europeans." A more honest reading: free spectacle in a secular country that enshrined abortion as a constitutional right in 2024.
The substance of the visit is where the priorities surface. Leo will deliver a landmark AI speech at UNESCO, meet with Macron at the Élysée Palace on geopolitics and AI, and travel to Metz to pay tribute to Robert Schuman — the EU's founding father and a candidate for Catholic beatification. European leaders are expected to attend the Metz event. The Guardian framed the stop as part of the Pope's effort to discuss "Europe's future." BBC noted simply that Schuman was "a fervent Catholic." Either way, the Pontiff is lending his moral authority to the European project — the same bureaucracy that has presided over the continent's managed decline.
Meanwhile, Macron gets a diplomatic win in his final months. The Guardian called it exactly that: "a big win for Macron." BBC reported tensions between Macron's team and the Vatican over ceremony — Macron allegedly wanted a cavalry escort down the Champs-Élysées and a meeting with Notre-Dame artisans. The Pope declined the artisans meeting, citing a tight schedule. The priorities speak for themselves.
To be fair, Leo will meet with sexual abuse victims in Lourdes and a group of migrants in Paris. But those are scheduled alongside — not instead of — the UNESCO globalism and EU founder veneration. The Guardian noted Leo is "unlikely to wade into" France's constitutional abortion guarantee or its assisted dying laws, despite the French Catholic hierarchy opposing both.
Presidential candidates including Marine Le Pen, Édouard Philippe, Gabriel Attal, and Bruno Retailleau will attend Saturday's Mass, BBC reported. Macron himself will skip it — France's strict secularism laws prevent it, though his wife and prime minister will be there.
The Pope's paternal grandmother was born in Le Havre in 1894, giving the trip a personal angle. But ancestry doesn't explain the itinerary. What explains it is the same pattern across Western institutional leaders: the establishment serves the establishment. Christians face actual persecution worldwide — in Nigeria, in the Middle East, in China. The Pope chose UNESCO and the EU.
The open question is whether a Church that can't fill its pews in Europe's oldest Catholic nation can afford to keep prioritizing the institutions that replaced it.
