The October protests weren’t the only event to draw hundreds of thousands onto the streets of Paris. But the 800,000 who turned out on September 26 were a different crowd. This crowd looted no shops, burned no schools, vandalized no monuments. They didn’t even leave any litter.
They showed up to witness France’s first papal state visit since 2008.
Pope Leo xiv distanced himself from France’s current, unpopular leadership, declining President Emmanuel Macron’s offer of a state dinner, military honors and the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor, the highest distinction France has to offer.
He focused his September 25-28 visit on France’s youth. One of his first major events was a youth vigil, where 80,000 people packed the Stade de France. Tickets sold out in under an hour. It was “like it was Beyoncé,” one young fan told Le Parisien. The vigil included a glitzy retelling of Catholic history in France, with a 2,500-member choir, knights on horseback and fireworks.
The mass in the heart of Paris was even bigger. The Place de la Concorde, Paris’s largest public square, is where France’s Catholic monarchs were executed; it is a symbol of the French Revolution. Louis xvi and Marie Antoinette lost their heads there. No wonder many found it deeply symbolic to see the square filled with enthusiastic Catholic worshipers excited to see the pope.
Leo celebrated the Catholic revival in France. He said the surge in new converts “far surpasses statistical and sociological analysis” and “contradicts every defeatist attitude” about the church’s future.
Ten years ago, commentators were discussing France’s “zombie Catholics”—people who didn’t attend services but turned out in droves to support Catholic social policies and Catholic politicians. Now some of these zombie Catholics, and their kids, are returning to church. They see the pope as the solution to chaos within and without.
“A lot of people told me they appreciated this American pope for how he could stand up to today’s strongmen,” npr correspondent Eleanor Beardsley said. “They say he has an important moral authority in a world of disorder.”
The events of the last month seem to offer France a stark choice: migration, leftism, chaos and violence—or Catholicism, order and beauty.
Leo appealed beyond France’s borders. He finished his trip in Metz, close to the German border and to the home of Robert Schuman, one of the EU’s founding fathers.
“We cannot speak of Europe, then, without mentioning Christianity,” the pope said, emphasizing the Catholicism of Schuman and other European founders. He discussed the importance of “recognizing Europe’s debt to Christianity” and pointed out that Article 17 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union requires “open, transparent and regular dialogue with … churches.”
It’s no coincidence that the Catholic Church is offering such a contrasting vision as Europe erupts in flames.
This is exactly what Herbert W. Armstrong described in the November 1965 Plain Truth. “That crucial fact is this: The nations of Europe are utterly unable to unite themselves by their own political maneuvering,” he wrote. There are important national differences. How could the Germans tolerate a French strongman over them? Or the French, a German one?
“For years the Plain Truth has said these nations are going to have to realize their inability to unite themselves politically—to choose a common political-military leader that all can trust,” Mr. Armstrong continued. “They are going to finally face the fact they must look to a supreme authority they can all trust! That supreme authority cannot be a politician or a general …. The only possible answer is a religious leader!”
Trumpet publisher Gerald Flurry has continued to proclaim the same message. “Throughout Europe’s history, what has helped it to overcome its division has been a unity of purpose between church and state,” he wrote in our April 2006 issue. “… But this church-state union hasn’t always been a happy marriage. Usually the two have been drawn together because of a crisis—an emergency.”
Europe’s crises will push Europeans into the arms of a strongman—and toward a church that seems opposite the disorganized mobs of Muslim migrants that have poured in. They’re already looking to the pope to save them from strongmen beyond their borders, and when the Catholic Church advocates for Europe to get a strongman of its own, they will fill the streets in support.
Revelation 17 portrays the coming European empire as a beast with seven heads and 10 horns, ridden by a woman—a prophetic symbol of a church.
When this church takes the reins, many in Europe will believe they are heading for the best of times. Bible prophecy says it will be the worst of times. This empire will unleash the worst suffering the world has ever seen.
This Catholic-led empire is a false hope. But the real hope isn’t far behind. You can read more about the Bible’s forecast in your free copy of The Holy Roman Empire in Prophecy.