In 1804, when Napoleon Bonaparte forced Pope Pius VII to travel to Paris to confer some serious legitimacy to the military upstart's upcoming imperial coronation, the Pope was enthusiastically and respectfully received by crowd all along the way. Hard-line Republicans there still were (especially among the military elite), but the general populace cheered and crowds sought the Pope's blessing, rejoicing in the restoration of religious freedom after the unprecedented assault perpetrated by the dark forces of Enlightenment during the recent revolution.
Last week, Pope Leo XIV followed in the path of Pius VII and traveled (more quickly and comfortably, of course) from Rome to the onetime "Eldest Daughter of the Church." And, once again, notwithstanding the strong lingering power and presence of the Enlightenment's dark legacy of laïcité, he was received with great enthusiasm. Like his predecessor, Leo also visited Notre Dame, although not to crown an upstart emperor but to celebrate the cathedral's recent restoration as a house of God and spiritual center of France. Then he celebrated an outdoor Mass at the Place de la Concorde.
No site could have been more symbolic. Originally, the Place Louis XV, the largest square. in Paris became the Place de la Revolution, where the Enlightenment revolutionaries implemented their famous reign of terror, in which King Louis XVI, Queen Marie Antoinette, and many Catholic martyrs were murdered by the brutal, bloodthirsty secularist regime, which in time executed many of its own accomplices as well.
France remains still the source and summit of Enlightenment secularism and European civilizational suicide. Even so, stirrings of new life abound amid secularism's self-produced ruins. Of course, the crowds included the curious as well as the devout. Catholic ritual still exerts its enormous dramatic power to lift up emotions, even among mere observers. Yet, something is afoot in France - and elsewhere in secularized Europe - as the destructive consequences of the Revolution's legacy continue throughout the continent to turn hope into despair. Only the most hardboiled skeptical secularists seem still unable to understand why ordinary people might prefer hope over despair and be attracted to the one resource - already present in centuries of France's cancelled history - that can offer a way forward to hope instead of despair.
For centuries, the Enlightenment's dark imperatives have dominated our civilization, training us to look for fulfillment in a technological progress (that now threatens to destroy the planet and human life as we have known it) and an individual liberty (that has brought about isolation in place of family and friendship and community). As an alternative, Pope Leo, preaching at the Place de la Concorde, proposed "Jesus Christ, through his Incarnation, who comes to meet every person in the midst of his or her own story, and reveals himself as the true source of living water capable of quenching our thirst. This thirst that dwells in every human heart is not so much a thirst for material things, but a thirst for meaning, for truth and fulfilment. Jesus responds to our profound desire for relationship, for communion with God, in whom the fullness of life forever resides."
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