# The French Church Is Preparing for a Papal Visit It Has Not Had to Organise in Eighteen Years > Leo XIV comes to France from 25 to 28 September, taking in Paris, Lourdes and Metz. It is the first official papal journey to the country since Benedict XVI in 2008. - Source: France 247 - Canonical URL: https://france247.news/article/pope-leo-france-visit-september-preparations - Author: Julien Moreau - Section: Culture - Published: 2026-08-02T08:30:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-02T08:30:00.000Z - Tags: Pope Leo XIV, Catholic Church, Notre-Dame, Lourdes --- Leo XIV will travel to France from 25 to 28 September, and the Catholic Church in the country is now assembling the machinery to receive him. The programme runs across Paris, Lourdes and Metz, opens with solemn vespers at Notre-Dame on the evening of arrival, and includes a visit to the headquarters of UNESCO. It follows invitations from the head of state, from the French bishops and from the director general of UNESCO. The last official papal journey to France was Benedict XVI's in 2008, and eighteen years is long enough that most of the diocesan staff who ran that visit have moved on. Preparatory committees are being set up under the coordination of the bishops' conference, with the pastoral and logistical detail worked out between Vatican officials and the local dioceses, which is the ordinary shape of these things and also the part that determines whether they work. The three locations are not interchangeable. Notre-Dame carries the weight of the fire and the reopening, and putting the first evening there attaches the visit to the most widely followed French religious story of the past decade. Lourdes is the pilgrimage site, which addresses the practising Church directly and brings the largest crowds. Metz is the least obvious and therefore the most deliberate, a diocese with its own particular legal status inherited from the region's history, and a choice that says something about where the visit is meant to reach. UNESCO puts a secular institution in the itinerary of a religious visit, which is what allows the trip to function as a state occasion as well as a pastoral one. That combination is the awkward part in a country whose public settlement on religion is built on separation, and it is handled every time by keeping the two registers in different rooms. For the French Church the practical stake is visibility rather than doctrine. It arrives at a moment of contracted attendance and continuing institutional strain, and four days of national coverage is the largest single act of attention it will receive this decade. What is done with that is decided now, in committee, and not in September. --- Originally published by France 247. Free to cite with attribution and a link to https://france247.news/article/pope-leo-france-visit-september-preparations.