INTERNATIONAL
Pope Leo Fills Place de la Concorde as France's Politics Simmer
The Vatican put the Paris mass crowd at 800,000, capping a four-day visit the foreign press read as outreach to Catholicism's old heartlands.
Adriana Sole520 wordsEdition №128Sunday, 27 September 2026 — Edition № 128
Pope Leo XIV led an open-air mass on the Place de la Concorde in Paris on Saturday, with the Vatican estimating that 800,000 people turned out, according to Le Monde and CBS News. The mass closed a four-day state visit to France that the New York Times described as an effort to appeal both to Roman Catholicism's original heartlands and to its newest strongholds, following an earlier trip to Africa.
The visit was not without friction in the background. France 24 reported that the Vatican's recent excommunication of followers of the Society of Saint Pius X, an ultra-conservative splinter group with an extensive network of schools, has revived a longstanding feud within the Church and cast a pall over the trip. Lourdes featured in that coverage as a focal point of the ultra-conservative presence.