Pope Leo XIV, in France, will bring Catholic social teaching to a secular Europe

Pope Leo XIV flies to France on Friday, where across four days in three cities he will proclaim Catholic teaching to the heart of secular Europe on matters that include end-of-life questions, immigration, and artificial intelligence.

The visit “will truly be a moment in which Leo’s project of making the Church’s social doctrine better known can take shape,” said Father Patrick Valdrini, a former rector of the Institut Catholique de Paris.

France is statistically more secular than it was in 2008, when Pope Benedict XVI made a pastoral visit to the country. The latest data on religious identity in France, in 2019-2020, found that 51% of adults in France say they have no religious affiliation, an 8% increase from a decade before. While 29% of the population identifies as Catholic, the survey found only 8% say they go to Church regularly, according to the Institut National D’Etudes Démographiques .

Yet according to Cyprien Viet, a journalist with the French agency I.Media, the country has become more open to Catholicism in recent years. The reasons for this shift include sympathy for Christianity following attacks on churches and the 2016 killing by Islamist terrorists of Father…