{"id":15199,"date":"2026-05-16T10:49:36","date_gmt":"2026-05-16T10:49:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/15199\/"},"modified":"2026-05-16T10:49:36","modified_gmt":"2026-05-16T10:49:36","slug":"pope-leo-to-visit-france-in-september-vatican-says","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/15199\/","title":{"rendered":"Pope Leo to visit France in September, Vatican says"},"content":{"rendered":"

Pope\u00a0Leo\u00a0XIV\u00a0will\u00a0travel\u00a0to\u00a0France\u00a0for\u00a0an\u00a0official\u00a0state\u00a0visit\u00a0from\u00a0September\u00a025\u00a0to\u00a028,\u00a0the Vatican<\/a> announced on Saturday, the first such trip by a pontiff in 18 years.<\/p>\n

The first pope from the United States, elected in May 2025, will notably travel<\/a> to Paris<\/a> for a visit to the headquarters of UNESCO<\/a>, the United Nations culture<\/a> agency, the Vatican<\/a> said in a statement.<\/p>\n

The visit will come after a trip to Spain<\/a> in June, demonstrating the pope’s interest in engaging with historically Catholic but increasingly secular European countries that had been largely overlooked by his predecessor, Francis.<\/p>\n

Read more‘Friendly and constructive’: Rubio meets Pope Leo XIV in bid to ease tensions<\/a><\/p>\n

It will be the first papal state visit to France<\/a> since Benedict XVI<\/a> went in September 2008.<\/p>\n

While Francis visited France three times as pope\u00a0\u2013 to Strasbourg, Marseille and the island of Corsica\u00a0\u2013 those trips were not official visits by the Holy See.<\/p>\n

The president of the French Bishops’ Conference (CEF),\u00a0Cardinal\u00a0Jean-Marc Aveline, had extended an invitation to Leo to visit France, one repeated by President Emmanuel Macron<\/a> during his visit to the pontiff at the Vatican in April.<\/p>\n

A French speaker, Leo had expressed on various occasions “the great esteem in which he holds our country and her spiritual history,” Aveline said earlier in May.<\/p>\n

Read morePope Leo condemns inmate conditions on tour of infamous Equatorial Guinea prison<\/a><\/p>\n

Besides the capital, the pontiff will also travel to Lourdes, a site of pilgrimage for Christians worldwide.<\/p>\n

The southwestern French town’s important Catholic shrine welcome Jean-Paul II in 1983 and in 2004, as well as Benedict in 2008. Each time, hundreds of thousands of pilgrims gathered to see the pope, according to the sanctuary.<\/p>\n

(FRANCE 24 with AFP)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Pope\u00a0Leo\u00a0XIV\u00a0will\u00a0travel\u00a0to\u00a0France\u00a0for\u00a0an\u00a0official\u00a0state\u00a0visit\u00a0from\u00a0September\u00a025\u00a0to\u00a028,\u00a0the Vatican announced on Saturday, the first such trip by a pontiff in 18 years. The first pope…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":15200,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[5,11822,3838,9230,3837],"class_list":{"0":"post-15199","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-france","8":"tag-france","9":"tag-pontiff","10":"tag-pope-leo-xiv","11":"tag-state-visit","12":"tag-vatican"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15199"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15199\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15200"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}