The auxiliary bishop of ’s-Hertogenbosch, Mgr. Rob Mutsaerts, has dedicated a reflection to this issue following the Pope’s journey. Under the title Pope Leo in France. The guillotine and the cathedral, the Dutch prelate contrasts the anti-Catholic persecution of the French Revolution with the images of young people gathered to pray alongside Leo XIV more than two centuries later.
His thesis is summarized in a provocative generational comparison: “In 1968 it was rebellious to contradict the priest. In 2026 it can be almost rebellious to hear it.”
From the guillotine to the cathedral
Mutsaerts begins his article by recalling the three great principles proclaimed by the French Revolution—freedom, equality and fraternity—to counter them to the religious persecution unleashed during the revolutionary process.
“The tragic thing about revolutions is that they often start with perfectly reasonable outrage and end up with a completely senseless solution,” he writes.
The bishop recognizes the problems existing in the French Church of the Ancien Régime, including its privileges and its proximity to power, but argues that the revolutionary response ended up becoming an offensive against the Church itself.
Since 1789 ecclesiastical property was confiscated, religious communities were suppressed and the Civil Constitution of the Clergy of 1790 subjected the organization of the French Church to the new revolutionary order. Later radicalization led to the de-Christianization, closure and desecration of temples and the persecution of numerous priests and religious.
Mutsaerts particularly stops in the revolutionary attempt to replace Christianity with new cults.
“France was wanted to be free from superstition. And to demonstrate how rational they had become, they invented a new calendar, new feasts, new cults and even a Worship of Reason.”
For the bishop, that episode shows an anthropological constant: man can abandon the traditional religion, but he does not stop looking for realities to which to give absolute meaning.
From Worship to Reason to Woke Culture
Mutsaerts then takes his argument to the present and establishes a parallel with the woke culture.
In his opinion, part of contemporary progressive liberalism abandoned Christianity because he considered that he spoke excessively “of sin, guilt, conversion and truth”, to end up building a culture that speaks again precisely of those categories.
“Only without forgiveness, without grace and without humor,” he says.
The reflection serves as a prelude to the image that the bishop considers especially ironic: more than two centuries after the Revolution, a Pope gathers crowds in France again.
And Mutsaerts looks especially at young people.
More than 13,000 adults baptized this year
For the Dutch bishop, the crowds gathered during the visit of Leo XIV alone are not a demonstration of re-Christianization. That is why he is looking at another phenomenon that has been registering for several years: the strong growth of the catechumenate in France.
Official data from the French Bishops’ Conference support this trend.
At Easter this year, 13,234 adults were baptized, 28% more than in 2025. In 2016 it had been 4,124, so that the number has more than tripled over the past decade.
In 2026, more than 8,100 adolescents preparing to receive Baptism were added. Among adults, in addition, the largest group currently corresponds to young people aged 18 to 25, who represent 42%, slightly above the group aged 26 to 40.
Mutsaerts avoids presenting that data as proof of an immediate Catholic restoration of France.
“We must not immediately proclaim that tomorrow France will once again be the France of St. Louis,” he warns. He recalls that European secularization continues, that attendance at Mass remains at low levels in many places and that the Church carries serious wounds, particularly those caused by sexual abuse.
Precisely because of this context, it considers the phenomenon significant.
Christianity has the irritating habit of being buried just before it is resurrected
The prelate thus questions the idea that secularization constitutes a necessarily irreversible historical process.
“Perhaps a civilization can lose its religious memory without losing its religious hunger,” he says.
His reflection is especially aimed at those who have grown up in a society in which the great questions about the meaning of existence no longer necessarily receive a religious answer.
Christianity, Mutsaerts argues, again offers those young people something radically different: the claim that the universe is not indifferent, that good and evil are objective realities, that every human being possesses a dignity that cannot be lost and that God entered history personally becoming man.
“For someone who has grown up with the message that it’s an accidental collection of atoms that you can consume for a few decades before the light goes out, that news may sound surprisingly fresh,” she writes.
Hence one of the central ideas of his article: rebellion changes when it changes that against which a generation rebels.
“In 1968 it was rebellious to contradict the priest. In 2026 it can be almost rebellious to hear it.”
When tradition is countercultural again
Mutsaerts applies the same investment to some of the dominant principles of contemporary culture.
If freedom is presented as the absence of bonds, he points out, a young man may discover that love requires precisely commitment. If it is claimed that each one possesses his own truth, it may be countercultural to ask whether there is an objective truth. And if tradition is presented as a burden, a Church with two thousand years of history may end up becoming more novel for a young man than the ephemeral trends of social media.
This is where the bishop finds the great historical irony of the images left by the journey of Leo XIV.
The Revolution withdrew crosses, closed convents, pursued priests, and even replaced the Christian calendar. More than two centuries later, Christianity remains present and thousands of young people are knocking again at the doors of the Church.
Mutsaerts does not interpret this as a guarantee of an upcoming conversion of Europe. He presents it, rather, as a warning to those who inevitably gave the disappearance of faith as modernity progressed.
“The world has organized the funeral of Christianity many times,” the bishop concludes. “The strange thing is that the deceased keeps appearing again and again.”
The paradox acquires for Mutsaerts its most graphic expression in the France that Leon XIV has just traveled: «The guillotine has disappeared. Now there appears a man dressed in white who proudly raises the cross.”