The Place de la Concorde in Paris has been filled this week with workers building a kind of removable church so that the Pope can celebrate his mass mass here on Saturday afternoon. 230 years ago this was the Place de la Révolution and here, on the same ground that Leo XIV will step on this week, the guillotine that beheaded Louis XVI in January 1793 and, nine months later, Marie Antoinette, was placed. Heads rolled. But the Revolution not only decapitated a certain power that emanated from heaven, but also persecuted priests, closed churches, turned Notre-Dame into a Temple of Reason and tried to replace the Christian calendar with one of its own. Here was born the idea that would structure the Republic, which would later be called secularism and which, just when Pope Leo XIV landed in France, was going through one of its greatest crises.
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