There’s a moment, watching Pope Leo XIV step through Notre-Dame’s doors on Friday evening, that’s hard not to sit with for a second. Seven years ago this cathedral was on fire, live, on every screen in the world. Now here he was, the first pope to walk in since it reopened the first, in fact, since Benedict XVI stopped by back in 2008.
He didn’t waste any time getting there, either. Day one of his four-day trip through France opened with a popemobile ride through central Paris, crowds packed several deep along the route organizers had been bracing for a quarter of a million people to show up, and by most accounts, they weren’t far off. Earlier that day, over at the Élysée, he’d given French officials something to chew on too, warning that an AI-driven “paradise of machines” could end up hollowing out what makes us human. Not exactly the speech you’d expect on a state visit, but that’s Leo XIV for you.
By late afternoon he was at Notre-Dame for Vespers 5:15 pm, solemn, about 2,000 bishops, priests, seminarians and religious packed into the nave. He talked about the fire in his homily, about how the whole world had watched “holding its breath” as the building burned, and how that pain wasn’t just felt by Catholics. Fair point. Plenty of people who’d never set foot in a church still remember exactly where they were when they saw the spire come down.
The cathedral shut its doors to regular visitors for the occasion no public Masses, nothing, from the 24th through the 26th. Understandable, given the crowd he brought with him.
Then it was straight up to Saint-Denis, to the Stade de France, for a youth vigil that pulled in something like 80,000 young people. Reporters wandered the crowd beforehand some kids there out of genuine faith, others admittedly just curious, dragged along by friends or by the sheer scale of the thing. Either way, eighty thousand people singing and praying together in a stadium built for football is its own kind of spectacle.
And that was just Friday.
The trip runs through the 28th, taking him to Lourdes and Metz after Paris. Saturday’s the big one an open-air Mass at Place de la Concorde and down the Champs-Élysées, with something close to 600,000 people registered to attend. After that he heads to Lourdes, where he’s due to meet with seven survivors of clerical abuse, a heavy stop in a country still reckoning with an inquiry that found around 330,000 children were abused by clergy or lay Church members over seven decades.
For now, though, Friday belongs to Notre-Dame and to a stadium full of teenagers who stayed out late on a Friday night for something other than the usual reasons.