Friday, September 25, 2026 · Independent editorial

That the world may have life

More than 600,000 people were expected at an open-air Mass with Pope Leo XIV in Paris. The line he carried into that week was that the world may have life. Christian K. Caruzo’s report is the source. A crowd that size is not a private devotion.

The four-day apostolic journey began Friday when the Pope left Rome’s Fiumicino for Orly and a meeting with President Emmanuel Macron before Paris Lourdes and Metz. Registrations opened August 10 and about 200,000 signed up in the first few hours and Archbishop Laurent Ulrich of Paris noted registration was encouraged not required so the crowd may run past the count. Macron will skip the Mass for France’s strict church-state split while Brigitte Macron and Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu represent the government and presidential hopefuls including Marine Le Pen are expected in the pews. Per Vatican News the motto is That the world may have life and Cardinal Secretary of State Pietro Parolin told Vatican News the motto upholds human life welcomed loved and cared for from conception to natural death and that behind that motto one can read that the world may believe because there is no life of the body without life of the soul. He pointed to France’s young adult catechumens and Europe’s falling birth rates. The same Friday at the Élysée OSV News and Reuters report Pope Leo told Macron and French authorities that the protection of the right to life constitutes the indispensable foundation of every other human right and warned against profit-driven ventures promoting genetic manipulation surrogacy organ trade or arranging one’s own death. A midterm is not a Mass. A presser is not conception to natural death.

Being a Christian in America this week is refusing to confuse a crowd on the Champs-Élysées with nostalgia and refusing to confuse a right-to-life sentence at the Élysée with a caucus talking point. Keep the altar. Keep the unborn and the dying. And do not confuse a midterm with Pope Leo asking that the world may have life.

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