Pope Leo puts human dignity before machines in France

Pope Leo XIV boarded an ITA Airways A321 at Rome’s Fiumicino airport at 7:58 a.m. The plane landed at Paris Orly at 9:56 a.m. Church bells tolled across France when the flight touched down.

President Emmanuel Macron greeted him on arrival. The four-day Apostolic Journey runs Sept. 25-28 through Paris, Lourdes and Metz. It is the first official papal visit to France in 18 years; the last was Benedict XVI’s in September 2008. The motto is “That the world may have life.”

Under a clear blue sky the pope crossed central Paris in the popemobile. Balconies and sidewalks were decked in Vatican yellow and white. The Vatican estimated 300,000 people along the route. He blessed the forehead of a little girl hoisted above the crowd. People rushed forward to kiss his hand before he entered Notre-Dame, the first pontiff inside the renovated cathedral after the 2019 fire.

Terry Spytek, 83, had come from the United States for a three-second look. “I feel it right here, in my heart,” she told AFP. “I feel very touched even if it was a very quick glance.”

At the Élysée Palace Leo met Macron privately, then addressed authorities, civil society and the diplomatic corps. He said technology must serve people and be guided by ethical judgment. “If we are to avoid losing our humanity amid a paradise of machines invading and conditioning our daily lives, there is an urgent need for education in ethical discernment and the capacity to acknowledge the moral good.” He warned that measuring human worth by efficiency risks dehumanization.

Those words landed in a country where a survey last year found only about five percent of 69 million residents attend Catholic church regularly. Infant christenings have declined. Teenage and adult baptisms are rising. Up to a million people were expected at Paris events over the first two days.

The UNESCO stop was the first papal visit to the organization in more than 40 years. John Paul II spoke there on June 2, 1980. Leo’s program ran in Rooms I and II, at the invitation of Director-General Khaled El-Enany. “While ‘intelligence’ is attributed to computational systems, we struggle to recognize the inalienable dignity of human persons,” the pope said. “Meaning is the oxygen of the mind.”

He quoted UNESCO’s 1945 Constitution: “Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed.” He added, “Peace cannot be built by treaties alone.” Peace, he said, is not a balance of power. He called for nuclear weapons to be banned and urged dialogue and diplomacy, including in the Middle East. He asked France to remain a tireless champion of peace and multilateralism.

“We are all born naked and in need,” he said. “Information is abundant, but it is not synonymous with wisdom.” On human coexistence he offered a plain contrast: “Communion in no way suppresses diversity. Rather, it enables diversity to flourish in the harmony of voices and faces.”

Peter Thiel answered the regulatory impulse from another direction. In a conversation with Axel Springer chief executive Mathias Döpfner, the PayPal and Palantir co-founder said a papal call to regulate artificial intelligence helps China. “The Communist Party of China is not going to listen to the pope. There’s a chance people in the U.S. will. And so in effect, the Pope’s encyclical was working for the Communist party,” Thiel said. “I’m not saying he was an agent of the communists, but he was at least acting as a useful idiot for the CCP.” He added that the U.S. backlash against AI is mainly “what we’re doing to ourselves,” not a Beijing operation.

That argument does not erase the faces in the French streets. Jean Pelee, 27, waited among 80,000 people ages 17 to 35 at the Stade de France for the evening prayer vigil. “I find it pretty crazy that there can be 80,000 of us and that we can all pray together,” he told AFP. “I go to mass every Sunday, and it’s true that I’m used to seeing a somewhat older crowd there.”

Gavin Ashenden, on Sky News, called the images a marvellous occasion for anyone with a sense of history. France, he noted, moved from eldest daughter of the Church to the parent of a revolution deeply hostile to it; a Mass near where the guillotine once stood would set that history in hard relief. He pointed to rising baptisms and secular people coming to faith as possible signs of a Catholic springtime. Notre-Dame’s rebuilding, he said, has struck many as a sign that communities, like buildings, can rise again. The Church’s distinctive public claim, in his account, is an unwavering defense of the dignity of the human person made in the image of God—against economic or medical disposal of the weak, and against the coming pressure of artificial intelligence.

The visit unfolds inside France’s live fights over secularism and end-of-life law. The right to abortion was written into the Constitution in 2024. Lawmakers recently gave final approval to a bill allowing adults with incurable illness to receive lethal medication. The French Catholic hierarchy opposed both. Andrea Tornielli wrote in Vatican News that the pope “is not landing in the City of Light to condemn anyone, nor to barge into the French political debate, which is as polarized as that of every other European country.” “He comes as a shepherd to meet a people, their history, and their culture.”

Charles Mercier put Macron’s interest in plainer political terms. With the president barred from a third term in May elections and approval ratings near record lows, “it can be important to be aside the pope and to capture a part of his popularity. It’s not new.”

Security matched the scale of the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Plans for Friday in Paris alone called for 14,000 police officers, gendarmes and military personnel and 2,500 firefighters.

Fox News framed the arrival around the historic Lourdes pilgrimage and a French city known for medical miracles. After Paris, the pope goes to Lourdes to pray at the Grotto of the Apparitions, meet the bishops and the sick, and meet privately with victims of clerical sex abuse. Metz follows, with an interreligious encounter and Mass, before the return to Rome on Monday evening.

On Saturday he celebrates a giant Mass at Place de la Concorde and the adjoining Champs-Elysées.