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Pope Leo XIV concludes historic France visit with open-air Paris Mass attended by hundreds of thousands
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Pope Leo XIV concluded his historic four-day visit to France on Saturday with an open-air Mass at Paris’s Place de la Concorde, drawing an estimated 600,000 faithful along the Champs-Élysées, according to France 24, AFP and Reuters .
The Mass capped a visit that began Friday, when Leo XIV addressed 80,000 young people at the Stade de France in Saint-Denis, where he celebrated what Le Monde described as “the battle for faith, which does not use the weapons of violence, contempt or oppression” . Earlier that day, he met French President Emmanuel Macron at the Élysée Palace, where he warned against losing “our humanity in a paradis of machines,” urging ethical discernment in the use of artificial intelligence, Courrier International reported .
The visit, the first official papal state visit to France in 18 years, also included a stop at UNESCO headquarters, where Leo XIV reiterated his call for technology to serve humanity rather than become an instrument of domination, according to the same report . Organizers distributed 350,000 yellow-and-white papal flags and ordered 500,000 hosts for Saturday’s Mass, NRC reported .
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