PARIS — Pope Leo XIV knelt in prayer before a set of four stone steps at the Garden of the Carmelites on the campus of the Catholic University of Paris, a gesture that carried centuries of history. The stairs are etched with the Latin words Hic Cicidereunt — “Here they fell” — marking the spot where roughly 150 priests were held prisoner and then slaughtered during the September Massacres of 1792, three years into the French Revolution.
The memorial commemorates a specific atrocity: the killing of Catholic clergy who had refused to swear allegiance to the revolutionary state. According to the historian Christopher Hibbert, armed men burst into the garden of the Carmelite Convent off the Rue de Vaugirard, where about 150 priests had been held for two weeks under guard. When the Archbishop of Arles stepped forward, he was struck across the face with a sword; a pike was driven through his chest as he fell. The remaining clerics were killed and their bodies heaped together.
Long afterward, the Church beatified these men as martyrs. On Saturday, the Pope’s silent stop — with flowers garlanding the gray stone — drew a crowd of cameras and, according to Breitbart’s reporting, amounted to a quiet challenge to the French state itself.
A History of Hostility
The French Revolution was not only a revolt against King Louis XVI; it was also, and especially, a war on the Catholic Church. Revolutionaries went so far as to establish a rival Cult of Reason — Culte de la Raison — a project that historian Hibbert and others describe as remaking society by force. The specific ceremonies faded, but the underlying secular project, in this telling, never really did.
Even after the Revolution’s heat cooled, the source argues, French political leaders maintained a posture of deep hostility toward the Church. In the early 20th century, a wave of legislation sought to crush religious influence: instead of killing priests, the state outlawed most of their activities. That policy of laïcité, or secularity, has largely remained in force ever since.
The Pope’s visit offered an alternative vision of France, one featuring spectacular pageantry alongside intimate encounters with the faithful. His homage to the martyrs, in this reading, was a direct rebuke to the murderous antecedents of President Emmanuel Macron’s government — a government that still flies the same tricolour flag that inspired the 18th-century assassins. Breitbart likened the gesture to a pope visiting a memorial to British Redcoats who fought against the Patriots in the American Revolution.
Mass at the Place de la Concorde
To sharpen that implicit critique, Pope Leo XIV celebrated Mass at the Place de la Concorde — formerly the Place de la Révolution — the very site where, during the Reign of Terror, thousands of Christians were publicly executed by guillotine. The placement was almost certainly not accidental.
Photographs from the event captured the Pope waving from the popemobile with the Arc de Triomphe in the background, blessing a child along the Champs-Élysées, and greeting a toddler upon arrival. An estimated 800,000 worshippers gathered along the avenue to attend the outdoor Mass, according to the reporting.
The images also showed the scale of the event: crowds stretching from the Place de l’Étoile down the Champs-Élysées, an artist painting during the service, and general views of the Mass in the heart of a city that once executed priests for refusing to renounce their faith.
For observers inclined to read symbolism into papal travel, the message was clear. The Pope’s quiet stop at the four small steps — and his solemn Mass on the ground where the guillotines once stood — amounted to a public act of memory, and perhaps a warning. As Breitbart’s piece noted, a society that begins by killing off adherents of other faiths enters the zone of the Khmer Rouge and other murderous systems. The Church, in this view, remembers what happens when radical secularism gains the power of the state.
Whether French officials saw the gesture as a rebuke or simply as a pastoral visit, the Pope’s itinerary left little doubt about where he stood. The Garden of the Carmelites and the Place de la Concorde are now linked by a single day’s journey — and by a history that France has never fully reconciled.
Source: www.breitbart.com — https://www.breitbart.com/faith/2026/09/26/pinkerton-pope-leo-attacks-the-root-of-left-wing-radicalism-in-france/