Christ's Visible Presence

Last weekend, for the first time in nearly two decades, the Holy Father made a four-day apostolic journey to France. His visit stunned the country: more than 800,000 people packed the Place de la Concorde and the Champs-Élysées for the Pope’s Mass on September 26, and 80,000 tickets sold out for the prayer vigil the night before, an event specially geared toward young people.

“I have to ask,” one journalist wrote in advance of the visit, “Who, aside from the Pope, is capable of bringing together 600,000 people in France in 2026? Who else but him is able to foster a sense of national unity in our country?”

It’s a good question. The answer is probably: nobody.

Indeed, it’s worth taking a step back to consider what has happened here. The visit of one man to a country drew crowds numbering to the thousands. And that man was no one particularly special. Just a few years ago, virtually no one knew who Robert Prevost was. He was regarded as smart, talented, close to the Lord, but in his circles, and not really beyond that. But now, just a few days ago, hundreds of thousands of people came to see him, cheering and singing and filled with joy to be in his presence. Was it because he suddenly did something exceptionally extraordinary? Was it because he saved Europe, or brokered world peace, or achieved some other amazing feat? Not really.

In fact, it had nothing to do with anything like that. One could probably say that had Pope Leo done any of those things, it likely would not have made any difference at all to those who came to see him. Because they didn’t really come to see him. The Pope drew the crowds that he did not because of himself, but because of someone else: Jesus. Because the Pope represents the visible presence of God in the world.

Indeed, Pope Leo is to us much more than one talented leader in a world full of talented leaders. He is a sign of the supernatural nature of the Church. For on the one hand, we might think that the Church is just another institution doing its institutional thing – tending to its members, establishing churches and missions and schools, and so on. But on the other hand – the more telling hand – it’s obvious that the Church is not just that at all. If the leader of any other institution were to show up to France, it’s unlikely that 800,000 other people, including the president, would come out to greet him. Why? Well, the skeptic might say that it’s because the Church is just really powerful; she’s just a particularly influential force in the world. But is that quite true? What can the Church really do, after all? The Church does not have guns or armies with which it can exert its will; it doesn’t have an established authority over governance and law. And yet people feel compelled to draw near to her – again, not because she’s such a high-quality institution. But because of Jesus. Because the Church is the face of God. And because people want to be near him, even if they can’t quite articulate how or why or that they do.

It’s easy to find ourselves making determinations about who’s “important” or “impressive” or “having an impact” in the world. But then something like this happens, and we realize that God has his own calculations; he has his own scale of importance, his own way of “making an impact.” And that way is usually not the way that we would expect. Because it involves a condescension and a mystery that is so much more than we could predict or understand: he comes to us himself, really and tangibly, in persons like Pope Leo, and in institutions like the Church. This moment in France is thus a sign, and a reminder: the real history of the world isn’t the one we’re composing. The real history of the world is the invisible one, the one that God’s writing – the one that, every so often, we’re given a look behind the curtain to see.