Pope Leo XIV arrived in Paris on Friday for a four-day official visit to France — the first papal state visit in 18 years — delivering pointed warnings about artificial intelligence, nuclear weapons, and the erosion of the rule of law, while drawing tens of thousands of faithful into the streets of the French capital.

Touching down at Orly Airport, the 71-year-old pontiff was received by French President Emmanuel Macron at the Élysée Palace, where he addressed the gathered political leadership on some of the defining challenges of the era. Cautioning against losing humanity in a "paradise of machines," Leo urged that new technologies "remain at the service of the human person rather than becoming yet another instrument of domination and injustice." He later repeated those warnings at the Paris headquarters of UNESCO, the United Nations body for culture and education, arguing that when intelligence is attributed to computational systems, "we struggle to recognise the inalienable dignity of human persons." Macron echoed the concern, calling for international oversight to prevent the most powerful AI systems from being controlled by a small number of actors or used to oppress people. The pope also challenged France's reliance on nuclear deterrence, rejecting the belief that such weapons guarantee security and warning they fuel an arms race that is difficult to control.

Beyond technology and security, Leo made a veiled but pointed critique of world leaders who treat justice "as though it were a commodity to be bought and sold" — remarks that drew particular attention given his broader track record of criticising global leadership. He also expressed concern about recent French legislation granting some adult patients the right to assisted dying, citing trends he said risk turning science into "profit-driven ventures." On the ongoing war in Ukraine, now into its fifth year following Russia's full-scale invasion, he urged French officials never to "grow resigned to the prospect of war or to consider it inevitable," and called on Paris to remain a "tireless champion of peace."

The visit carried deep symbolic weight, coming at a moment of political and spiritual significance for France. Pope Francis, Leo's predecessor, never made a full state visit during his 12-year pontificate and declined to attend the 2024 reopening of the restored Notre-Dame Cathedral — the medieval Gothic landmark in central Paris that was devastated by fire in 2019. Leo, by contrast, led vespers at Notre-Dame on Friday evening before travelling to the Stade de France, the national stadium in the northern suburb of Saint-Denis, where some 80,000 young people aged 17 to 35 gathered for an evening of prayer and dialogue with the pope. The scenes coincided with a notable uptick in Catholic engagement among younger French people: a record 13,000 adults and 8,000 teenagers were baptised last Easter, according to the Church. France remains a formally secular state, however, governed since 1905 by the principle of laïcité — the strict constitutional separation of church and state.

Leo, whose paternal grandmother was born in France, is scheduled to visit Lourdes, the town in the Pyrenees foothills that has been a major Christian pilgrimage site since the 19th century, where he will meet privately with seven survivors of clerical sexual abuse — a figure that some survivors' groups have said should be larger. A landmark 2021 report estimated that 330,000 children were abused by priests or church-affiliated figures in France over seven decades, describing the cover-up as "systemic." The visit concludes Monday in Metz, a city in France's northeastern Lorraine region, where the pope is expected to deliver a speech on European peace.