PARIS — Pope Leo XIV warned on Friday that a "paradise of machines" could undermine humanity itself, opening a four-day visit to France with a warning that placed artificial intelligence alongside nuclear weapons and assaults on human rights as threats to human life. Speaking first to President Emmanuel Macron and French authorities at the Élysée Palace, and then to diplomats and United Nations employees at the headquarters of UNESCO, the U.N.'s culture and education agency, the pope framed his message less as a headline address than as a set of questions about what it means to be human in an age of accelerating technical change.
The papal remarks came at a moment of sustained geopolitical stress. With wars plaguing Europe and the Middle East, Leo used his platform in Paris to restate the Vatican's formal opposition to nuclear weapons and to attack the strategic logic that underpins them. The doctrine of nuclear deterrence, he argued, is "mistaken," because it does not prevent war so much as fuel a fresh arms race — an argument with obvious implications for the alliances and arsenals that have defined European security since the Cold War.
The pope's prescription was as notable as his diagnosis. "Peace is not a balance of power; rather, it is built day by day through dialogue and justice," he said — a formulation that implicitly criticizes the transactional, balance-of-power diplomacy that has characterized much of the past decade, and that lands with particular force in a country that has built its postwar identity on multilateral institutions.
For observers of the Catholic Church in France, the setting complicates the message. The pope spent part of his first day addressing a country where the Catholic Church has lost ground in shaping ethical debate, because France's strict approach to secularism is enshrined in its Constitution. In a society where church arguments on social and moral questions carry less public weight than they once did, a four-day visit by the head of a global church carries a particular symbolic charge.
That symbolism was visible on the streets. Thousands of people lined the route of the papal motorcade, waving French and Holy See flags, and some waited for hours in unseasonable heat just to catch a glimpse of the pontiff. The size and enthusiasm of the turnout underlined how unexpected the level of interest in the visit is — the first official state visit by a pope to France in 18 years.
The religious dimension of the trip was on display the same evening, at a prayer service in Notre Dame Cathedral, where angelic choirs and the building's famous organ framed the celebration. For worshippers in the pews, the encounter carried an emotional weight that politics alone does not explain. "To see him, praying with us, it comforts us in our faith and on our path," said Senegalese Sister Antonia Faye, describing her first-ever event with a pope. "Being with the pope is different to being alone or praying alone. We felt the benediction that came down on us."
The Notre Dame setting is not incidental. The cathedral, emblematic of French Catholic life and of the nation's resilience, reopened after years of reconstruction following the 2019 fire — making it a powerful stage for a pope seeking to speak about renewal, dialogue and the survival of shared moral reference points.
The visit is also, transparently, a diplomatic capstone for Macron. French voters will go to the polls in May, and the president is barred from seeking a third term, which makes hosting the American pope — the first pope from the United States — a final high-profile hosting role at the Élysée. The contrast with his predecessor's approach is stark: Pope Francis declined repeatedly to make a proper state visit to France during his 12-year pontificate, pointedly refusing even to join the inauguration ceremony. Leo's arrival, by contrast, comes with the full apparatus of a state visit.
For Macron's government, the timing carries domestic value as well. Beyond the crowds and the chanceries of state, a papal visit offers a moment of unity and international visibility at a moment when France's leadership of European affairs is being tested by conflict abroad and domestic political transition at home.
Analysts of the visit point to the structure of the pope's day as a summary of his method: a meeting with power in the morning, a meeting with the United Nations system in the afternoon, and a meeting with the faithful in the evening. Each address addressed a different audience — political, diplomatic and spiritual — but all turned on the same question of whether civilization's tools will serve human dignity or erode it.
That question is likely to remain the organizing theme of the remaining days. With four days of an "intense" program ahead, Leo has time to develop the theme he opened with: a warning that the glittering promise of a machine-made paradise, if pursued without moral limits, could cost humanity the very thing it hopes to preserve.
The stakes of that argument are not abstract. The technology race is accelerating, the arms race Leo described is under way, and the wars he invoked remain unresolved. In Paris, at least, the pope has found an audience willing to hear the case that progress must be judged by what it does to human beings, and not only by what it makes possible.
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