Pope Leo XIV heads to Lourdes after record Paris Masses

Pope Leo XIV visited the Marian pilgrimage sanctuary of Lourdes in south-western France on Sunday 27 September, according to a short France 24 video released at 10:39 that day, closing a sequence of days in which the pontiff has drawn crowds of a size France has rarely seen for a papal gathering. The 90-second report, published under the France section and tagged France, Catholic Church and Pope Leo XIV, comes at the end of an official visit to France whose Paris leg drew attendance estimates running into the hundreds of thousands.

The Paris numbers were extraordinary by any measure. France 24's related coverage of the pope's programme includes reports of around 600,000 people attending a giant open-air Mass in the centre of the capital, alongside other outlets' and organisers' estimates of as many as 700,000 crowding the Champs-Élysées for the celebration. Hundreds of thousands also lined the avenue to watch the popemobile pass, and the pope blessed babies along the route. The scale turned an ordinary state visit into something closer to a national event, and it set up a striking contrast with the quieter, more devotional setting the pope moved to in the foothills of the Pyrenees.

Lourdes is one of the most important pilgrim destinations in Catholic Europe. The sanctuary's story rests on the apparitions reported in 1858 by Bernadette Soubirous, a 14-year-old miller's daughter, at the grotto of Massabielle, and the spring that was said to have appeared at her prompting. Since then the town has drawn millions of visitors a year, and the sanctuary has become a global site of prayer for healing, baptism and reconciliation, visited not only by the devout but by pilgrims seeking relief from illness or grief. For a pope, the call of Lourdes is symbolic as much as pastoral: it is the place where the smallest and most unlikely of beginnings is said to have produced one of the Church's most enduring stories.

The visit also carries a specific historical resonance, marking 150 years since the 1858 apparitions as an anniversary that Catholic commentators have treated as a moment for reassessing the message of Lourdes for a contemporary Church. Lourdes is a place where prayer is requested rather than proclaimed, which makes it an unusual destination for a papacy that increasingly speaks in the register of instruction and policy. Coming after the youth-focused Mass and the vast public celebrations in Paris, the move north to Lourdes reads as a deliberate return to the register of devotion that the scale of the Paris gatherings temporarily displaced.

For French Catholics, the timing of a Lourdes visit is rarely just symbolic. The visit falls amid reports of a surge in baptisms and renewed interest among young people in belonging to Catholic communities, a trend France 24 has documented during the same visit. Pilgrimage sites such as Lourdes have long been argued to function as entry points for families and young adults who are not regular churchgoers but respond to the atmosphere of a healing, intergenerational community. A papal visit amplifies that dynamic enormously, drawing media attention and bringing lapsed and non-participants into contact with the Church at a moment when vocations and mass attendance elsewhere remain a concern for bishops.

There is also a policy dimension to the trip. During the visit to France, Pope Leo XIV issued a public call to protect migrants, an appeal that observers have read as closely tied to the wider European debate on asylum and border policy. That theme, alongside the pope's earlier statements on artificial intelligence and his participation in United Nations–related discussions, has framed the visit as one with an unusually wide substantive agenda for a papal tour. Lourdes, a site associated with care for the sick and the vulnerable, provides a natural moral frame for those concerns, and church organisers have traditionally linked pilgrimages there to solidarity with the suffering, whether through the healing pools, the blessing of the sick, or simply the long tradition of prayer requested for people in distress.

Logistically, a papal visit to Lourdes is a very different proposition from a Mass on the Champs-Élysées. The sanctuary's open spaces can absorb crowds, but the grotto, the basilica and the processional routes are constrained, and security, accessibility and the needs of pilgrims who arrive on foot or in organised groups all require careful planning. Officials also have to balance the presence of the pontiff with the character of the place: Lourdes depends on being able to receive ordinary pilgrims, and a heavy security presence can quickly alter the atmosphere that draws people there in the first place.

Reaction footage and images of the pope's arrival have circulated widely, with pilgrims and volunteers describing the day as one of profound emotion. Such gatherings at Lourdes have traditionally drawn a distinctive mix of the young and the elderly, of the able-bodied and the sick, and of French and international pilgrims, with people arriving in wheelchairs, on walking sticks, and with children in tow. That social mix is precisely what makes the sanctuary such an effective point of contact between the Church and people who may feel distant from institutional religion.

For analysts of French religious life, the significance of the visit lies less in any single image from Massabielle than in the sequence as a whole: a pope who began his visit in front of hundreds of thousands in the capital, addressed young people at a giant gathering, blessed infants, called for the protection of migrants, and then travelled to a small town in the Pyrenees to pray. That arc, moving from spectacle to silence, is widely considered characteristic of a papacy keen to show that scale and intimacy are complementary rather than competing.

Attention now turns to how the visit concludes and what follows it. Lourdes typically draws a programme of ongoing events and pilgrimages well beyond a papal visit, and organisers have used this moment to press for continued attention to the sick and to the sanctuary's charitable works. France 24's coverage will continue to track the pope's remaining engagements, along with the questions raised by his French trip: the response to his appeal on migrants, the country's reception of his wider remarks on technology and international affairs, and the longer question of whether the extraordinary welcome he received will translate into something more durable for a Church seeking to reconnect with the French public.