Pope Leo's France Visit Exposes a Schism Rome Has Not Closed

Pope Leo XIV's four-day state visit to France, which culminated in a Mass in Paris on Saturday that the Vatican estimated drew 800,000 people, has been shadowed by the Vatican's recent excommunication of followers of the Society of Saint Pius X, according to France 24. The ultra-conservative splinter group, which France 24 reports has built an extensive network of schools and attracted thousands of followers, has revived a longstanding feud within the Roman Catholic Church at the very moment the pope is seeking to present a unified front in one of Catholicism's original heartlands.

The New York Times reported that Leo's trip, following a visit to Africa, reflects a deliberate strategy of appealing both to Roman Catholicism's historic European centres and to its newer strongholds. That balancing act is precisely what the SSPX rupture complicates, France 24 noted, because the society's rejection of parts of the Second Vatican Council places it outside the mainstream the pope is trying to consolidate.

The schism is not a French affair alone. The SSPX and groups like it maintain priories, chapels and schools across Europe, and Italy — home to the Vatican and to a dense network of traditionalist communities — is directly implicated in any question of how Rome manages its most stubborn internal dissent.

The timing is awkward for the Holy See. France 24 reported that the excommunication has cast a pall over a visit designed to showcase the pope's pastoral reach, and Le Monde reported that during his stop in Lourdes, Leo urged the Church to confront clerical sexual abuse and to reject France's newly adopted assisted-dying legislation. The pope is thus asking the French Church to face its hardest internal questions while the Vatican's own disciplinary action against the SSPX remains an open wound.

Al Jazeera reported that the pope held an emotional two-hour meeting in Lourdes with seven survivors of clergy child abuse, at which he pledged action. That encounter, paired with the SSPX excommunication, frames a papacy that is simultaneously reaching outward to secular France and inward to discipline its own dissidents — a dual posture that Italy, as the seat of the Church, will feel more acutely than any other country.

The BBC, in explaining the purpose of the visit, noted that the Paris Mass was the highpoint of the trip, with more than half a million people expected. CBS News World, citing the Vatican, put the eventual figure at 800,000. The scale of that turnout is the pope's strongest counter-argument to the schism narrative: whatever the SSPX commands, the mainstream Church in Europe still fills public squares.

For Italy, the practical question is institutional. The Vatican is an enclave within Rome, and the Italian Church is the largest national body in the Catholic world; how Rome resolves its relationship with traditionalist dissent will shape the pastoral landscape in Italy for years. France 24's reporting makes clear the feud is longstanding and unresolved, and nothing in the pope's France itinerary suggests a settlement is imminent.

What the wire does not yet show is any formal step by the Vatican to reconcile with the SSPX or to soften the excommunication. Until that appears in the international coverage, the schism remains a background fact of Leo's pontificate — one that his successful Mass in Paris has not erased, and that Italy, at the centre of the Church's geography, has every reason to track.