Pinkerton: Pope Leo Attacks the Root of Left-Wing Radicalism in France

It was a small gesture with big historical, moral, and political impact.  

During his visit to France, Pope Leo XIV stopped and prayed in front of a staircase at the Garden of the Carmelites on the campus of the Catholic University of Paris.  Those stairs—just four small steps—are etched with the words, Hic Cicidereunt (“Here they fell,” as in, were killed, in Latin).  Pretty flowers garlanded the gray stone as the Pope paused, and the cameras clicked and whirred.

The memorial honors events from September 1792, three years after the beginning of the French Revolution—a revolt directed at not only the royalty of King Louis XVI, but also especially at the Catholic Church.  

In fact, the revolutionaries in their radicalism had gone so far as to cook up their own rival Cult of Reason.  Yes, that’s really what they called it: Culte de la Raison; the specific ceremonies didn’t last, although many would say that secular humanism is, for sure, still thriving as a kind of religion or cult. 

We can pause to observe: It’s okay to start a new belief, but if it begins by killing off adherents of other faiths, it’s in the zone of the Khmer Rouge and other murderous systems.  

Describing the French plan to remake society, here’s how historian Christopher Hibbert recalls the events that Leo prayed over: 

A gang of armed men burst into the garden of the Carmelite Convent off the Rue de Vaugirard where about 150 priests who had been held prisoner for the past fortnight, were gathered under guard . . . The men advanced upon them, calling out for the Archbishop of Arles. One of the priests went forward to meet them, demanding a fair trial for himself and his fellow-prisoners. A shot was fired and his shoulder was smashed.  The Archbishop, after praying for a moment on his knees, then went towards the men himself. “I am the man you are looking for,” he said, and was immediately struck across the face with a sword. As he fell to the ground a pike was plunged through his chest.

Whereupon, all the rest of the clerics, too, were killed, their bodies thrown down in a heap. It’s a comfort knowing that long ago, the Church beatified these martyrs.

At one level, Leo’s quiet deed at the Garden of the Carmelites was simple Christian decency—paying his respects to fellow faithful.

Yet at another level, Leo was challenging the French state.  You see, even after the heat of the French Revolution had cooled, the dominant political leaders in France maintained their attitude of deep hostility to the Catholic Church. In a wave of legislation in the early 20th century, the government sought to crush religious influence.  The state was no longer killing priests, it was merely outlawing most of their activities.

For the most part, this policy of laïcité, or secularity, has been in force ever since.  In American terms, we might think of it as the ACLU in charge, overseeing churches and their flocks.  (Interestingly, both the French state, and the ACLU, are much more tolerant of Islam than they of Christianity.) 

But now comes the Pope. His whole visit, featuring spectacular pageantry, as well as up-close-and-personal missions, has provided an alternative vision of France, for the French.  A vision of Christianity and its related traditions, not atheism with a carveout of favoritism for Islam. 

And then there’s that homage to the martyrs—a direct rebuke to the murderous antecedents of French President Emmanuel Macron’s government, which today flies the same tricolour flag that inspired the 18th-century assassins. A rough equivalent in the U.S. would be if the Pope had come here and paid his respects at a memorial to the British Redcoats who fought against the Patriots in the American Revolution. 

To drill his implicit critique further, the Pope celebrated a mass at the Place de la Concorde, formerly known as the Place de la Revolution, the very place where, during the revolutionary Reign of Terror, thousands of Christians were publicly executed. 

Leo’s steady dignity, his measured sense of purpose—and okay, his showmanship—recalls his trip to Spain in May, where he was equally correct and resolute in his remembrance of those martyred by that country’s past left-wing terrorists.

Indeed, we might think back further, to Pope John Paul II’s mission to Poland in 1979. Back then, Poland was a captive nation, held in bondage by the Red Army of Soviet Russia.  Yet the Pope’s peaceful pilgrimage to his home country unleashed a tidal wave of sentiment that helped power, first, the anti-communist Solidarity movement of Lech Wałęsa and then, secondarily, the epochal fracturing of Moscow’s evil empire in Eastern Europe.  

To be sure, the French government, and the myrmidon edifice of the European Union, are not as bad as the communism of old. And yet France and the EU are plenty bureaucratic, heading toward stultification and socialism of some kind, and seemingly fully desirous of snuffing out freedom of religion (at least for Christians), albeit on a slower timeline.  

In fact, one contribution of the Trump-Vance administration has been to highlight this planned subversion of ancient rights and rites. Both Donald Trump and JD Vance have broken with past trans-Atlantic platitudes, warning the Europeans that their secular bureaucratic progressivism is, in fact, a threat to liberty, as well as to prosperity. 

The truth is that all moral struggles take place in three time phases: the present day, of course, but also the future and the past. That is, to succeed in persuasion, a protagonist must paint a picture of a better future, and it’s also vital to teach from history, to use past events to illustrate the successes to emulate—or the failures not to repeat.

This Pope knows that the French Revolution is the fons et origo of all left-wing revolutions—from Russia to China to Cuba to Cambodia—in which the faithful, including Catholics, were often the first victims.

Revealingly, here in the U.S., a leading left-wing publication calls itself Jacobin, after the most guillotine-happy faction of the French revolutionists. (And that title serves as a warning: what the hardcore left would do to us if it had the power.) 

So by his quiet actions, Leo is striking at the root of the revolutionary left, undercutting their legitimacy by reminding the rest of us that they are, if they gain the power, murderous.

Why, one could even say that Leo is wielding the sword of the Lord, striking blows for the prayerful victory of righteous memory.