PARIS — Pope Leo XIV opened the first official papal visit to Paris in eighteen years on Friday with a pointed challenge to his hosts, telling President Emmanuel Macron and French civil authorities that "the protection of the right to life constitutes the indispensable foundation of every other human right" — a direct rebuke of France's assisted-dying law, delivered at the Élysée Palace hours after his plane touched down at Orly airport.

The four-day journey, running through Sept. 28, is Leo's fifth international trip since his election in May 2025 and the first Vatican state visit to the French capital since Benedict XVI in 2008. Police estimated crowds of up to 250,000 people would line his popemobile route through central Paris, with roughly 80,000 tickets sold for a youth vigil planned at the Stade de France this weekend.

His first meeting with Macron exposed real friction between the Élysée and the Vatican. Macron cast French secularism as the guarantee of freedom of conscience, while Leo countered that "true secularism does not consist in excluding religion from the public space." The pope also broke with Paris on nuclear policy, questioning whether atomic weapons offer any genuine security guarantee and calling instead for an end to the arms race.

Leo returned to a warning he has repeated since taking office: that unregulated artificial intelligence risks reshaping humanity itself. "If we are to avoid losing our humanity amid a 'paradise of machines' invading and conditioning our daily lives, there is an urgent need for education in ethical discernment," he said, adding separately that the technology could be turned toward "surveillance, manipulation and discrimination."

First Prayer Since the Fire

By evening, Leo became the first pope to set foot inside Notre-Dame Cathedral since it was gutted by fire in 2019, leading vespers before the newly restored high altar seven years after flames tore through its roof and spire.

"The collective effort to rebuild it, and the splendor of the result, reveal that the heart of a people beats here, and that here we stand at the living center of a civilization, where past and future embrace, where heaven and earth meet."

The visit continues this weekend in Lourdes, where the pope is scheduled to meet seven survivors of clergy sexual abuse, including former students of the Notre-Dame de Bétharram school, where more than 230 complaints were filed in 2024, before concluding Monday in the border city of Metz with an address on European unity and peace.