PARIS — Pope Leo XIV opened an unusually consequential visit to France on Friday with a warning that a "paradise of machines" could undermine the very humanity it promises to serve, pressing questions about what it means to be human in an age of artificial intelligence, nuclear weapons and other threats to life itself.
The pope's remarks came during a busy opening day that included an address to French President Emmanuel Macron and other officials at the Élysée Palace, followed by a separate gathering with diplomats and United Nations employees at the headquarters of UNESCO, the U.N. culture and education organization. The two settings underscored the dual character of the trip: a highly political encounter with a head of state, and a pointed appeal to the international institutions that the Catholic Church has long courted.
A capstone moment for a president nearing the end of his tenure
The visit is also widely read as a diplomatic capstone for Macron, who is constitutionally barred from seeking a third term in elections due in May. His invitation carries symbolic weight in a country where the pope has, until now, been a polarizing figure rather than a welcome guest.
That awkward history is a key part of the story. Pope Francis declined repeatedly to make a proper state visit to France during his 12-year pontificate, and pointedly steered clear of the ceremony marking Macron's inauguration — a snub remembered well in Paris. Leo's arrival, by contrast, is billed as the first official state visit by a pope to France in 18 years, and the reception has been strikingly warm for a leader of a church with a complicated relationship to French public life.
A church on the margins in a secular state
The timing is delicate because the Catholic Church has lost ground in France's public debates on ethical questions, an erosion many observers attribute to the country's unusually strict approach to secularism, which is enshrined in the French Constitution. In that environment, papal pronouncements on social and moral issues can land differently than they might elsewhere in Europe.
That makes Leo's chosen themes — technology, nuclear disarmament and human rights — relatively safe ground for a pope seeking common cause with a secular republic, and unusually well aligned with a French state that has staked out its own position on artificial intelligence regulation and European strategic autonomy.
No to nuclear deterrence, yes to dialogue
On the security side, Leo used the platform to renew the Vatican's long-standing opposition to nuclear weapons. Speaking against the backdrop of wars plaguing Europe and the Middle East, he called the nuclear deterrence doctrine "mistaken," arguing that it does not prevent conflict so much as fuel a new arms race — a position that is unambiguously on the side of French and European mainstream thinking, and one of the few points on which the Holy See and the Élysée are reliably aligned.
"Leo is doing something diplomatically astute here," one senior European observer noted of the speech. "He is speaking about humanity in the abstract, but landing on a message about disarmament, human rights and the moral costs of technology — all of which let France hear a pope in a register that does not reopen the culture-war questions that have historically made papal visits to France so fraught."
The pope's core argument, however, is philosophical rather than political: he asked what it means to be human at a moment when machines are becoming ever more capable, and whether technical progress, pursued without moral limits, erodes rather than enriches human dignity. The framing — hopeful about dialogue, deeply suspicious of technology as a solution to political failure — is consistent with a pontificate that has made the dignity of human life its central organizing principle.
Thousands turn out despite the heat
The public response suggested the trip has struck a much more resonant chord than a purely institutional visit. Thousands of people lined the motorcade route, waving French and Holy See flags, with some braving hours of unseasonable heat to catch a glimpse of the pope. The turnout, by most accounts, was unexpectedly large, and it underscored the surprising level of public interest in Leo's visit.
That warmth was also on display at an evening prayer service at Notre Dame, an event that drew a visibly moved congregation. Among those in attendance was Senegalese Sister Antonia Faye, who described the evening as her first encounter with a pope.
"To see him, praying with us, it comforts us in our faith and on our path," she said, noting the angelic choirs and the cathedral's booming organ. She added that being in the pope's presence felt fundamentally different from being alone or praying alone, and that the experience left those present feeling, as she put it, the benediction that came down on them.
The contrast between such scenes and France's constitutional secularism is the central tension of the visit, and it is likely to shape everything that follows. Leo has an intense four days ahead of him, and his message — built on dialogue, justice and the long daily construction of peace rather than any balance of power — will be tested in a country where religious speech is expected to stay at a comfortable distance from policy. The crowds lining the route suggest that, for this visit at least, the distance may prove narrower than either side expected.
The joint statement with Macron at the Élysée Palace on Friday, Sept. 25, provided the formal backdrop, but the pope's two audiences — political leaders and U.N. workers — received the same underlying appeal: that a world of emerging technologies and nuclear stockpiles is manageable only if humanity stays awake to the moral questions that technical progress cannot answer for itself.
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