The Shameful Spectacle of the Pope’s Visit to France

The following is an English and lightly edited version of a speech given by National Secular Society (NSS) President Keith Porteous Wood on 26 September 2026 at a press conference in Paris hosted by the NSS, Libre Pensée, and the Association Internationale de Libre Pensée. On that date, Pope Leo XIV was in France on an ‘Apostolic Journey’.

The Pope should of course be free to visit France and his Catholic clerics and flock here.

But there are numerous reasons why it is neither appropriate nor legitimate for the President of theoretically secular France to invite here, for a state visit, this absolute monarch of a minuscule non-democratic European country, practically the only one not to have felt morally obliged to ratify the European Convention on Human Rights.

Let us start with cost. Why should the state (and especially the 98% of the population who are not weekly mass-goers) pay enormous amounts for police, security, and presumably the Pope’s round trip by plane from Rome to Paris, Metz, and Lourdes? Even the cost—not to mention the wholly unwarranted inconvenience—of closing off the Place de la Concorde and large parts of the Avenue de la Grande Armée and of the Champs-Élysées for a mass must be huge.

The French Roman Catholic Church (FRCC) is bearing some costs for other events, but why not the whole cost? It is hardly as if it can’t afford it. Despite its duplicitous and manipulative claims to poverty when it comes to paying out abuse victims, its cash, investments and sellable real estate are estimated to total €7.5 billion.

And while we are on the question of costs, it is well past time to rescind the Concordat that France foolishly took over post-WWI, resulting in its paying clerics’ salaries for Alsace-Moselle. And maybe also time to consider handing the churches back to the Church, together with the responsibility for maintaining these generally poorly attended buildings.

Why should the state sponsor the visit when the majority of the population are not even believers? There would be more justification for inviting leading atheist Richard Dawkins, but I am not suggesting that either.

The Church’s popularity continues to sink at a significant rate—in the 1950s mass attendance was 25%, but now it is just 2%. Much of this decline has been due to the public’s very reasonable revulsion at the obscene levels of sexual abuse of children by clerics, compounded by the Church going to inordinate lengths to protect the clerics from criminal prosecution.

Even the FRCC has admitted that since 1950 there had been 330,000 childhood victims of abuse within the church between 1950 and 2020—so therefore presumably over a million abuses. In my view this preposterous invitation for an official visit is an insult to every one of those victims. How can the President not see that? How many more victims would there have to have been for the President to have refused to sponsor a state visit?

The unpalatable answer is that I suspect to him the number is irrelevant. The Church is above the law, as evidenced by those million abuses resulting in only a minuscule number of prosecutions, and far fewer convictions. The police, prosecutors, and courts all looked, and continue to look, the other way.

We saw the Church being above the law again when Cardinal Barbarin’s conviction was, in my opinion, baselessly overturned by France’s Cour de Cassation in 2021. He did not deny having failed to report knowledge of the abuse, including the rape of probably 3,000 male scouts over decades by priest Bernard Preynat—which Barbarin’s predecessor had also known about.

Another example is the fact that members of both Houses of Parliament who, despite overwhelming evidence of widespread clerical abuse of minors, callously and negligently betrayed the victims by failing to instigate a national independent enquiry as many other European countries did.

And then there is the Government itself, which was asked formally both in writing and verbally on more than one occasion by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child to respond to criticisms of its handling of clerical abuse. It blatantly failed to respond, clearly more keen on avoiding embarrassing the Church rather than engaging with the Committee on measures that could aid past and future childhood victims of clerical abuse.

My penultimate point concerns former French Prime Minister François Bayrou. An official report recently concluded that he had failed to act on systemic physical and sexual abuse—even torture—at the Catholic boarding school, Notre-Dame de Bétherram, near Pau. Rapporteur Vannier concluded that it was ‘far from being a unique case’ and that there had been major ‘failings’ by the French state, the justice system, and the education ministry, which failed to implement proper checks and controls ‘from the local level right up to the highest levels of state’. Bayrou, also a former education minister, denied knowing of the abuse despite evidence to the contrary.

It gives me no pleasure whatsoever to now turn to the President himself. Instead of supporting the calls for far stronger measures to prevent further abuse, he instead, and predictably, chose to ‘denounce what he calls a political campaign of “destruction” against [Bayrou]’.

Under Emmanuel Macron, France’s claim to be a secular country has suffered a severe setback, similar to the US. The flag bearer of French secularism is now Québec, but of course it is under pressure from the Supreme Court of Canada to become less secular.

Let us conclude on an optimistic note, since Macron’s term is ending in the spring. Let us seek to make a restoration of France’s secularity a key demand for his successor.

But they will face a gigantic task. 

Related reading

France’s rocky road to the separation of Church and state, by Keith Porteous Wood

The Pope’s Apology, by Ray Argyle

How the Catholic Church still avoids accountability for abuse in Italy, by Richard Scorer

Pétain, Vichy France and the Catholic Church, by Keith Porteous Wood