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PARIS/LOURDES — Pope Leo XIV continued his official visit to France on Sunday, 27 September, travelling to the Marian sanctuary of Lourdes in the foothills of the Pyrenees, where the pontiff was due to venerate the shrine that has drawn millions of pilgrims since the reported apparitions of 1858. France 24 published video of the continuing visit at 13:19 local time, updating the item shortly afterwards at 13:24.
The Lourdes appearance caps a two-day programme in France that has so far been defined less by ceremony than by scale. On Saturday, 26 September, Leo XIV led a giant open-air Mass on the Champs-Élysées, a gathering that France 24's correspondents described as drawing 600,000 people, with other reports from the outlet putting the crowd as high as 700,000. The differing figures are typical of estimates for mass events in central Paris, where attendance counts depend on whether organisers count tickets issued, shuttle passengers and people who entered from side streets rather than through controlled gates.
Either way, the celebration was among the largest public religious gatherings in the French capital in recent memory, and it transformed a normally car-choked avenue into an open-air congregation spread from the Arc de Triomphe toward the Place de la Concorde. France 24 separately documented hundreds of thousands of people lining the route of the popemobile parade, watching the pope's vehicle move through the crowd in a procession that functioned almost as a civic parade as much as a religious one.
The tone of the visit was also deliberately youthful. In a report published the same day as the Mass, France 24 carried a clip of Pope Leo XIV addressing young people at the gathering, a choice of audience that observers have read as consistent with a papacy seeking to rebuild contact with younger Catholics in a country where formal religious practice has thinned considerably. A companion France 24 report examined what it described as a baptism boom in France, with more young people seeking Catholic community — a trend that puts a different light on the numbers gathering in Paris, suggesting that for a growing minority the Church is being rediscovered at the point of family formation rather than lost.
Family imagery ran through the Paris day. One France 24 item documented the Pope blessing babies on his way to the giant Mass, an image that circulated widely and underlined the pastoral, intergenerational character of the events. For parents who may not attend Mass regularly, the blessing functioned as an entry point: a brief, ceremonial contact with the Church that required no commitment beyond arriving with a child.
Beyond the devotional programme, the visit carried an explicitly political edge. France 24 reported that Pope Leo XIV used his official visit to France to call for the protection of migrants, a message delivered in a national context where immigration remains one of the most polarising issues in French public life, and where the country's legislative agenda has repeatedly included contested measures on asylum and border enforcement. Coming from a head of state with a large and much-publicised constituency of migrants within and beyond the Church, the appeal was framed as a natural extension of the pope's consistent insistence that the Church's vocation includes the most vulnerable.
The Lourdes leg carries a different register. The sanctuary, in the Hautes-Pyrénées department of the Occitanie region, is one of the most important Marian shrines in global Catholicism and has long been associated in particular with prayer for healing: the spring discovered in 1858 continues to be drawn by pilgrims, many of whom arrive seeking cures for illness or for relatives. Papal visits to Lourdes are traditionally low in spectacle compared with those to large urban basilicas, with much of the significance carried in quiet, unphotographed moments of prayer.
That contrast is precisely the point that commentators have emphasised. A pope who can draw six or seven hundred thousand people to a Mass in Paris and still spend the following day at a Marian shrine in the Pyrenees is, in their reading, underscoring two strands of his pontificate at once: the sheer public visibility of a global spiritual leader, and the contemplative, sacrificial model that the Lourdes setting represents. The pairing also speaks to an increasingly common pattern of papal travel, in which the official component of a visit — audiences, speeches, encounters with political leaders — is combined with a pastoral itinerary aimed at ordinary parishioners.
Analysts of the French Church have long cautioned that headline attendance figures should not be read as a simple measure of religious revival. France remains formally one of the largest Catholic populations in the world, but weekly attendance is a fraction of that nominal total, and the relationship between church membership and practice is a matter of continuing debate. Large papal events, by contrast, routinely attract spectators, tourists and families who identify with the Church loosely or not at all — a dynamic that church leaders welcome but do not necessarily count as conversion.
For organisers, the practical challenges of the past 48 hours have been substantial. Crowd management, medical provision, transport and security for a motorcade moving through a dense European capital are all significant undertakings, and any disruption would have dominated the coverage. The absence of such disruption is itself a form of communication, suggesting that the French authorities and local church were able to stage an event of this magnitude without visible friction.
Attention now turns to what follows. If the Paris Masses and the Lourdes visit marked the public high point of the trip, the remaining calendar — including further liturgical celebrations and any additional appeals on migration, youth participation and the Church's role in public life — is likely to shape how the visit is remembered. For France 24's audience, the story is still developing, and further coverage of the pope's programme in Lourdes will follow in the coming days.
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