On Monday afternoon, Emmanuel Macron sat in the front row of Saint-Étienne Cathedral in Metz as Pope Leo XIV celebrated the final Mass of his four-day visit to France. His presence might have been unremarkable but for one fact: forty-eight hours earlier, the president of the French Republic had conspicuously stayed away from Leo’s enormous open-air Mass at the Place de la Concorde in Paris.
Same president. Same pope. Same apostolic journey.
What had changed?
The obvious answer seemed to be laïcité, the distinctly French understanding of secularism that Americans often translate, somewhat inadequately, as “separation of church and state.” Macron had been criticized sharply in 2023 when he attended Pope Francis’s Mass at Marseille’s Stade Vélodrome. Ahead of Leo’s visit, the Élysée indicated that Macron would not attend the pope’s religious services.
But the closer one looks at what happened during Leo’s visit, the less satisfactory that explanation becomes.
France was hardly absent from the Mass at the Concorde. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu attended. So did Brigitte Macron, representing her husband, along with the presidents of both houses of Parliament and an array of present and former political leaders. The Republic, in other words, was sitting at Mass. The person missing was Emmanuel Macron.
Nor did French law require him to stay away.
Anne-Charlène Bezzina, a French constitutional scholar, said there is no legal or protocol distinction between the president and prime minister on this question. “Fundamentally, their attendance at a religious service poses no problem with respect to laïcité, so long as they do not take communion and do not give the impression of supporting a particular faith.”
For Bezzina, the important distinction is not principally between public and private space. It is between attendance and religious participation.
That is also broadly how Macron explained his decision to attend Francis’s Mass in Marseille. “I consider that it is my place to go,” he said at the time. “I will not go as a Catholic; I will go as President of the Republic, which is indeed secular.”
The distinction is different from the one Americans are accustomed to seeing. U.S. presidents have frequently attended worship and spoken publicly about their personal faith while exercising an office constitutionally prohibited from establishing religion. French presidential practice places greater emphasis on preventing the officeholder’s religious conduct from appearing to become an act of the Republic itself.
Bezzina recalled the maxim associated with Charles de Gaulle: “The Republic does not take Communion.” De Gaulle could attend Mass, but when appearing as president—particularly while traveling—he was careful about religious acts that might be interpreted as acts of the Republic itself.
The president, in other words, may have a religion. The Republic does not.
Yet law is only part of the story. Politics and perception matter too.
Lucien Jaume, emeritus research director at France’s National Centre for Scientific Research and Sciences Po and author of L’Éternel Défi: L’État et les religions en France, told me there was no constitutional obstacle to Macron attending a religious service. The 1905 law separating churches and the state, he emphasized, is more liberal than its reputation sometimes suggests.
Jaume also drew a distinction between the president attending worship inside a religious building and appearing at a Mass staged in a great public civic space. Macron’s absence from the Concorde, he suggested, may have reflected political prudence more than constitutional necessity. After the criticism surrounding Marseille, and with Macron already politically weakened at home, another argument over whether the president was favoring Catholicism may simply have been one controversy too many.
Jaume was careful to identify that as his personal interpretation rather than inside knowledge of the Élysée’s thinking.
Then the story changed.
On Sunday evening, Metz Mayor François Grosdidier learned that Macron might attend Monday’s Mass after all. The news required officials to revisit the ceremony’s protocol overnight. Macron’s presence mattered because he would become the puissance invitante—the inviting authority—in place of the mayor, Grosdidier told Le Monde.
By Monday morning, the Élysée said Macron had “reorganized his schedule.” He attended the Mass with Brigitte Macron and later accompanied Leo to the airport.
The immediate reason for extending his stay appears to have been diplomatic rather than liturgical. French reporting indicated that Macron wanted to prolong the conversation he and Leo had begun earlier in the visit. After Mass, the two men spent another half-hour in private conversation before Macron accompanied the pope to the airport for the formal farewell.
That distinction matters. There is no evidence that Macron suddenly changed his interpretation of laïcité, nor that he rearranged his day simply because he had decided he wanted to attend Mass. The extended diplomatic schedule put him in Metz; attending the intervening Mass was a choice.
But Metz introduced yet another complication.
Saint-Étienne Cathedral stands in Moselle, one of the parts of France where the 1905 separation law does not apply.
Alsace and Moselle were part of the German Empire when France enacted the law. When the territories returned to France after the First World War, they retained a different church-state settlement rooted in the old Concordat. To this day, the relationship between government and religion there differs substantially from that in Paris.
One surviving feature is particularly striking: the president of the secular French Republic retains a formal role in the process by which the Catholic bishops of Metz and Strasbourg are appointed. France’s Interior Ministry has described the unusual arrangement as a system of “co-nomination” between the Holy See and the French government.
There is no evidence that this legal anomaly had anything to do with Macron’s decision to attend Leo’s Mass. It should not be turned into a convenient “loophole” explaining his presence.
But it does reveal something important about the way laïcité is often described outside France. French church-state relations are not one clean wall erected in 1905. They are an accumulation of law, history, revolution, concordats, republican custom and political interpretation.
The papal side of Leo’s visit presents a similar problem of overlapping identities.
The Holy See’s official program calls Leo’s trip an “Apostolic Journey.” Yet Vatican News, announcing the same journey in May, described it as “the first official papal state visit” to France in 18 years.
The apparent contradiction is almost a summary of the problem.
Leo came to preach, pray, celebrate Mass and meet French Catholics. But the itinerary also included a welcome by Macron, a private meeting at the Élysée Palace and encounters with civil authorities, an address at UNESCO and, finally, the formal farewell between pontiff and president.
The pope can make an apostolic journey without ceasing to be a sovereign.
Modern popes have deliberately shed much of the old visual vocabulary of monarchy. Paul VI famously abandoned the papal tiara, once among the most conspicuous symbols of papal temporal authority. His successors have emphasized the pastoral character of the papacy far more than its princely trappings.
Still, the man in the white cassock is simultaneously Bishop of Rome, head of the Catholic Church and sovereign of Vatican City State. Diplomacy cannot always separate those identities any more neatly than French protocol can divide Emmanuel Macron the man from Emmanuel Macron the president.
That may be the most revealing lesson from the strange choreography of Leo’s four days in France.
At the Concorde, Macron could legally have attended Mass but chose not to. France nevertheless was officially represented. In Metz, Macron extended his schedule for diplomatic reasons and chose to attend the cathedral Mass while remaining unmistakably the president. Indeed, his presence was so presidential that the protocol itself had to be rewritten around him.
The law can tell us whether Emmanuel Macron may attend Mass. Protocol can decide where the president sits. Laïcité can establish boundaries around what he does once he is there. Politics can influence whether appearing there is prudent.
But none of those things can make Emmanuel Macron stop being president when he walks through a cathedral door.
Nor, for that matter, does a white cassock make Leo XIV cease to be a sovereign.
Church and state can be separated by law. People, offices and the histories they carry with them are considerably harder to divide.
