POPE IN FRANCE/II - Behind the figures: the fragmented and “indecipherable” expectations that will greet Leo XIV

by Marie-Lucile Kubacki

Paris (Fides news Agency) – An exceptional mobilization is taking shape ahead of Pope Leo XIV’s visit to France.
Tickets for the events scheduled during the papal visit have been snapped up. The 80,000 places available for the vigil at the Stade de France were allocated in less than an hour, while more than 200,000 people registered within the first few hours after registration opened for the Mass.
The enthusiasm has prompted numerous comments in both the Catholic and mainstream press. “As if he were Beyoncé: why young Catholics are waiting for Leo XIV like a superstar,” Le Parisien headlined. “A beautiful sign for the Church in France,” commented Bishop Étienne Guillet of Saint-Denis, for Fides.

There is a very French paradox here. The figures, when properly examined, reflect the complexity and contradictions — both real and apparent — of a secularized France in which the Catholic Church is still capable of mobilizing large crowds.

Figures to be handled with caution

Only 1.8% of the population in France attends Mass every week (according to a 2017 Ipsos survey), while just 5% do so with some regularity. Among baptized Catholics in France, only 6% declare themselves as believers and practicing Catholics. In 2021, the proportion of people who said they believed in God fell below the 50% threshold in France (Ifop survey for Ajir, 2022).
Less than a quarter of young French people in this age group identify as Catholic. Among them, more than one-third never pray (Report by the Institut Catholique de Paris and St Mary’s University, Twickenham, “Europe’s Young Adults and Religion,” Stephen Bullivant, 2018). Twenty-eight percent of baptized people now consider themselves “non-Catholic,” while 40% do not intend to have their children baptized, compared with 25% in 2012 (Ifop survey for Mission magazine, Les Français et le catholicisme, 2022).

The collapse in religious practice could be compounded by the decline in vocations, prompting historian Guillaume Cuchet to argue that what is taking place is no longer so much a matter of individual abandonment as of disengagement among the second and third generations, marking a rupture in the family transmission of faith (Comment notre monde a cessé d'être chrétien. Anatomie d'un effondrement, Éditions du Seuil, 2018).

At the same time, almost one French person in two — more than 32 million people — “feels connected to Catholicism” (Viavoice opinion survey for the Observatoire de la laïcité, 2019). Fifty-seven percent of the population continues to engage in devotional practices outside an institutional framework, such as lighting candles in churches; 44% visit shrines or pilgrimage sites; 39% pray to God, the Virgin Mary or the saints; and 23% leave prayer intentions in designated books (Ifop survey, 2022).
Moreover, since spring 2021, against the backdrop of a decades-long decline in infant baptisms, there has been an unexpected increase in requests for baptism among young adults.

The reality that “flies under the radar”

Looking at these statistics leads to several conclusions rich in teachings for mission.
The first is that French Catholicism is moving from a culturally dominant model toward a reality fragmented into small communities — a “Catholic archipelago,” in the words of sociologist Yann Raison du Cleuziou.
In an interview, the scholar, who studies the transformations of French Catholicism, observed: “Popular religiosity is maintained and flies under the radar because it does not fit into the usual categories used in surveys to describe Catholicism.”
He added: “In parishes, one can observe a revival of devotions that were considered popular in the 1960s, especially devotion to the saints, the Virgin Mary and the Sacred Heart.” He explained that this movement was being driven by two independent trends: the growth of practicing Catholics as a result of the minority status experienced by Catholicism, particularly among those with more traditional religious sensibilities; and the renewal of Catholicism’s popular base through migration.
“Catholics who have arrived from overseas or Africa, or even from Central or Mediterranean Europe,” he explained, “are reviving devotions that had been falling into disuse” (La Vie, 2024).

Another phenomenon extensively analyzed by Guillaume Cuchet is the growth of the “SBNR” — “spiritual but not religious” people. These are individuals who no longer identify with the institutional framework of traditional religions — churches, dogmas and communal rites — but who, particularly among younger generations, maintain or develop personal spiritual quests, beliefs or practices “à la carte,” which may draw on elements rooted in Christianity.
This can be seen in popular productions such as Avatar, which combines elements of shamanism with biblical themes.
“The growth of ‘nones’ (without religion) introduces an extraordinary unknown into our religious and philosophical history,” Cuchet writes. “Broadly speaking, three dominant profiles can be distinguished: 1. ‘Secular nones,’ generally atheists or agnostics, whose numbers are growing; 2. ‘Liminal’ or ‘transitional nones,’ who are moving between two affiliations and for whom this position is only temporary; 3. ‘Religious’ or ‘spiritual nones,’ who are believers but not tied to a particular creed or religious institution.”
He concludes: “Depending on which subtype dominates tomorrow, we may find ourselves with very different spiritual worlds” (La montée des sans religion en Occident, Études, 2019).

The siren calls of identity and neo-idealism

This is why the concepts of “minority” and “de-Christianization” must be handled with caution, otherwise, they risk becoming trees that obscure the forest and distort the missionary perspective.
As Yann Raison du Cleuziou analyzes in an article on newly baptized adults, attachment to rites of passage, festivals, votive shrines and architectural heritage — such as village churches, not to mention the 2019 Notre-Dame de Paris fire, which sparked a wave of national emotion — expresses a connection to collective memory and local history, as well as a search for transcendence and social bonds, for “common goods,” in the face of individualism and the instability of the present.
At times, however, this attachment takes on an “identity” dimension, when heritage is politicized to define an immutable national essence and identify “enemies.” This is a temptation insofar as some practicing Catholics are marked by a sense of decline or by the perception of Catholicism as a “minority.”

Yet both the “identity” question and “spiritual purism” — which seeks to isolate faith from any cultural context — are two sides of the same process of secularization, the researcher argues.
“Are Catholics who oppose the Gospel alone to the historical Christian heritage not perhaps giving in to the ‘historical monophysitism’ denounced by Pope Francis in his letter on history?” he asks.
He describes “a spirituality that exalts the uniqueness of the Christian Incarnation to such an extent that it ends up de-incarnating it into an inaccessible, ‘angelic’ ideal, with no other possible temporal way forward than a form of prophetism before which society is always guilty.” “This purism leaves politics to the self-proclaimed realists and can encourage the marginalization of the Gospel, which comes to be seen as an elitist idealism.”
He concludes: “A certain identity-based cynicism may be the reverse side of spiritual purism. Two radically opposed forms, yet paradoxically united in their opposition between faith and culture. The phantom of cultural purity and that of spiritual purity share the same obsession with mixing and, therefore, with history.”
This places the relationship between faith, religion and culture at the heart of the Church’s missionary urgency.
“Without sustained work on this blind spot,” Raison du Cleuziou argues, “spiritual protests will remain without any real grasp on the trends they need to combat.”

Analysis, the unexpected and the expectations of hearts

The crowd that will come to cheer the Pope will be the fruit of this history of French Catholicism, shaped in its recent form by the paradoxes of secularization.
It is a situation that is at once highly complex and remarkably simple: the children of the “eldest daughter of the Church,” as John Paul II called France, are today, as yesterday, waiting for a word that will awaken in them the desire “to make something great of their lives” and lead them to lift their gaze toward the horizon.
(Fides news Agency, 19/8/2026)

Share:

papa leone xiv

---

---

local churches

---

---

mission

---

---

secularization

---

---

popular worship

---

---