Leo XIV calls 80,000 young people to the combat of faith at the Stade de France

On 25 September 2026, at the Stade de France in Saint-Denis, a prayer vigil gathered some 80,000 young people around Leo XIV, the first high point of his journey to France. Taking up three verbs from Saint Paul's second letter to Timothy, “flee, pursue, fight,” he named the “path of holiness” and declared that “the combat to which we are invited is the combat of faith.” He invoked “the land of Saint Joan of Arc” and held up as an example Blessed Marcel Callo, a young scout and worker who died in a concentration camp.

That the Christian life is a warfare, the perennial doctrine has never concealed. On the day of Confirmation the Church makes of the baptised a soldier of Christ, armed to confess the faith and to fight against its enemies, the world, the flesh and the devil. Saint Paul writes it without detour: “I have fought a good fight: I have finished my course: I have kept the faith” (II Tim. IV, 7), and he commands us to put on “the armour of God,” of which “the sword of the Spirit (which is the word of God)” (Eph. VI, 17). This is not one image among others: it is the very condition of the Church Militant here below, and the sword spoken of is that of the Word, not of iron.

So we gladly receive that the young be reminded of this combat, and that it be severed from all violence: “Our only weapon is that of love which gives itself.” The enemy is not our neighbour, but sin and the one who is its author. Holiness, called “the path the Lord opens before each of us,” is not the ornament of a few: it is the end to which every baptised soul is called, and outside of which none shall see God.

As for liberty, presented as bound up with “a living relationship with Jesus,” tradition says more precisely that it is the deliverance from the servitude of sin, which Christ alone works. It remains that this combat is waged by the means the Church has always taught, the sacraments, prayer, mortification and flight from the occasion of sin, which the first of the three verbs, “flee,” designates, and which the old treatise of the Spiritual Combat details without conceding anything.

Sources. Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566), on the sacrament of Confirmation; St Paul, Second Epistle to Timothy IV, 7, and Epistle to the Ephesians VI, 10-17 (Douay-Rheims, Vulgate); Lorenzo Scupoli, The Spiritual Combat; Dom Guéranger, The Liturgical Year.