Leo XIV at the Place de la Concorde: the thirst for meaning and the living water

Leo XIV celebrated an open-air Mass at the Place de la Concorde in Paris on the afternoon of 26 September 2026, on the second day of his journey to France, before travelling on to Lourdes. The pope built his preaching on the word of the Gospel of St John, “If any man thirst, let him come to me and drink” (Jn 7:37), and on what he called the thirst “for meaning, for truth and for fulfilment.”

Crowd estimates diverge across the reports: some spoke of more than 600,000 people expected on the square, others of 700,000, others still of nearly a million.

In his homily the pope recalled the first martyrs of Gaul — Blandina, Pothinus and Irenaeus — then St Martin, St Francis de Sales, St Vincent de Paul, Frédéric Ozanam and Jeanne Jugan. He addressed families and the young, telling them: “I think of you, dear young people; you are the Church of today.” He called the catechumens and neophytes “living witnesses,” and greeted those who commit themselves “in favour of life.”

To the baptized he put this question: “Baptized as we are, we have received the living water of which the Gospel speaks — but have we truly met Christ in person?” Taking up Origen, he described the believer as called to become “well, spring and river” for others, and he recalled that, for God, “none of us is a number on an identity card, nor a serial number, but a person, a unique and irreplaceable person.”

The thirst of which Scripture speaks

This thirst the Church has always known, and she names it without evasion. “Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our heart is restless until it repose in Thee,” wrote St Augustine at the threshold of his Confessions. The living water promised in St John is not one image among others: it is the grace received at baptism, by which man, dead to sin, is reborn a child of God. The Catechism of the Council of Trent teaches that this sacrament is the gate of the spiritual life and that it pours sanctifying grace into the soul — but that this grace, once received, must be kept and brought to its fruit.

The measure

Measured by this rule, the preaching at the Concorde strikes true precisely where it refers man’s thirst to Christ alone and recalls that the living water is received at baptism. The question put to the baptized — have they truly met Christ — restates in its own way the constant doctrine: baptismal grace is not a title acquired once for all, but a life to be maintained, on pain of remaining barren. To name the martyrs and saints of the soil of France is also to confess that the faith is not handed on in the abstract, but through men who lived it to the end. On these points the appeal rejoins what the Church has always held, and it must be said with the same simplicity as when we note a rupture.

Sources. Gospel according to St John 7:37 (Douay-Rheims, from the Vulgate). St Augustine, Confessions, book I, chapter 1. Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566), on the sacrament of baptism.