Leo building on Francis' legacy while reincorporating 'more traditional elements of papal activity'

Home France To display this content from YouTube, you must enable advertisement tracking and audience measurement. One of your browser extensions seems to be blocking the video player from loading. To watch this content, you may need to disable it on this site. Cover image: © France 24 10:52 Issued on: 28/09/2026 - 09:17Modified: 28/09/2026 - 09:19 Erin Ogunkeye is pleased to welcome Miles Pattenden, historian of the Catholic Church at the University of Oxford. For Pattenden, Pope Leo XIV’s visit to France is part of a broader recalibration of the papacy. While Pope Francis placed particular emphasis on the Catholic Church’s peripheries and the needs of the Global South, Leo is subtly bringing the Church’s historic European heartlands back into focus. France is especially significant in this regard, given its deep historical relationship with Catholicism and its evolving relationship with Christianity, European identity, secularism and contemporary geopolitical debates. Keywords for this article