Pope Leo XIV will travel to France for an official state visit from September 25 to 28, the Vatican announced on Saturday, the first such trip by a pope in 18 years.
The first Pope from the United States, selected in May 2025, will also travel to Paris to visit the headquarters of UNESCO, the United Nations’ cultural agency, the Vatican said in a statement.
The visit will follow a trip to Spain in June, underscoring the pope’s interest in engaging with historically Catholic but increasingly secular European countries that were largely overlooked by his predecessor. Francis.
This will be the first papal state visit to France since Benedict XVI’s visit in September 2008.
While Francis visited France three times as pope — to Strasbourg, Marseille and the island of Corsica — those trips were not official state visits from the Holy See.
The president of the French Bishops’ Conference (CEF), Cardinal Jean-Marc Aveline, had previously extended an invitation to Leo to visit France, an invitation repeated by President Emmanuel Macron during his visit to the Pope at the Vatican in April.
A French speaker, Leo had expressed on various occasions “the great esteem in which he holds our country and its spiritual history,” Aveline said earlier in May.
In addition to the capital, the Pope will also travel to Lourdes, a place of pilgrimage for Christians around the world.
The important Catholic shrine of the southwestern French city welcomed Jean-Paul II in 1983 and in 2004, as well as Benedict in 2008. Each time, hundreds of thousands of pilgrims flocked to see the Pope.
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