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Pope Leo XIV was in Paris on Saturday to celebrate Mass and encourage the nation of France to return to its Catholic roots, and on Sunday, my rural Catholic church was so packed to the rafters that I could not find a parking space and had to park on the grass. Even as I was getting out of my car, more parishioners started pulling in next to me. Inside, there were people standing in the back because a place on the pew was hard to come by and babies, so many babies, were making noise to reach the heavens. I loved to see it, as my cousin says "if it's not crying it's dying", and the Catholic church today in 2026 is very much thriving.
An estimated million people crammed onto the Champs-Élysées to greet Pope Leo XVI and overflow sites had to be set up to accommodate all the people who wanted to see the Pope and hear his Mass. This was his first public Mass in France and while the nation, like so much of the West, has devolved into secularism, Leo's visit reinvigorated the Catholic population. There were thousands of young adults there, too, who are looking for meaning in a fallen world and have likely discovered that pleasure, extravagance, and folly do nothing to quench the desire of the soul for truth, beauty, and love of the divine creator.
"Seeing you gathered here," Pope Leo told the faithful gathered for Mass at the Place de la Concorde, "my brothers and sisters, heirs to France's long and beautiful history of faith, I say to you: drink from the source that is the pierced heart of Jesus. Yes, you thirst for God, for life, for truth, for unity, for peace, for communion and for happiness. You long to rediscover a horizon filled with light and to build a renewed nation upon roots nourished by faith."
"You are today's church," he told them.
New Catholics are emerging in France, too, and undoubtedly some of them come from families of lapsed Catholics who felt they were too sophisticated, too worldly, to raise their children in the church and now those children seek their birthright of faith. My mother was raised Catholic in a Catholic family but that family faith was not maintained amid heartbreaks and problems. It was my father's second wife who raised me Catholic, and when I moved away, moving in with my mother and her second family, there was no place for faith there. I, too, fell away from the church.
But there's something so lasting about Catholic traditions that every time I was called back to Mass, whether in college when I went to Mass in the little town of Bronxville, occasionally dragging friends along who were faith-curious, or living in New York City when I kept trying out different churches, seeking one that was not empty and crumbling, or when finally my son was baptized in Brooklyn and set on the path of the sacraments, I knew all the words. I knew all the responses and the prayers.
There is something about knowing what to say that makes it easier to think about what you are saying and to burn the words into your heart. Within the words of those prayers, there is all the sky in the world to reach out with your soul to God the Father, Jesus his son, and the Holy Spirit and gain just a small glimpse of the reflected light of all the stars in creation.
Libby