Pope Leo XIV stopped and prayed on September 26, 2026, before a small stone staircase at the Garden of the Carmelites on the campus of the Catholic University of Paris. The four steps are inscribed with the Latin words “Hic Cicidereunt” — “Here they fell.” Flowers had been laid across the gray stone as the Pope paused there during his visit to France.
The site marks the September 1792 massacre of roughly 150 imprisoned priests, killed by an armed mob during the French Revolution. Historian Christopher Hibbert has described how the killers demanded the Archbishop of Arles by name, shot a priest who stepped forward on his fellow prisoners’ behalf, then struck the Archbishop across the face with a sword after he identified himself, before running him through with a pike. The rest of the imprisoned clergy were killed and their bodies piled together. The Church later beatified the victims as martyrs.
The killings came three years into a revolution that targeted both the French monarchy and the Catholic Church. Revolutionary leaders went so far as to establish a rival state religion, the Culte de la Raison — the Cult of Reason.
A Direct Challenge to French Secularism
France’s hostility to the Church did not end with the revolution. Beginning in the early 20th century, French governments passed a series of laws restricting religious activity under the policy of laïcité, or strict secularism, which has governed church-state relations in France ever since. Critics of the policy note it has applied unevenly, with more tolerance shown toward Islam than toward Christianity.
Later on September 26, Leo celebrated an outdoor Mass at the Place de la Concorde — known during the revolution as the Place de la Revolution, the site where thousands of Christians were publicly executed during the Reign of Terror. An estimated 800,000 people gathered along the Champs-Elysees to attend, according to photographs of the event, with crowds visible from the roof of the Arc de Triomphe.
The visit follows a similar trip Leo made to Spain in May, where he honored those killed by left-wing terrorists in that country’s past. Observers have compared the symbolism of Leo’s Paris visit to Pope John Paul II’s 1979 pilgrimage to communist Poland, a trip credited with fueling the Solidarity movement led by Lech Wałęsa and, eventually, the collapse of Soviet control in Eastern Europe.
President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance have separately criticized European secular governance in recent months, arguing that bureaucratic progressivism on the continent threatens both religious liberty and prosperity.
The Jacobins — the faction of French revolutionaries most associated with the guillotine and the killings Leo commemorated — lent their name to a left-wing American magazine still published today.
