This is BIG. Pope Leo has just told the bishops of France that laïcité does NOT mean Christianity should retreat from public life and that the answer to France’s secularisation is the public evangelisation of Jesus Christ. Speaking at Lourdes this morning, Leo insisted that the Church has “every right to be heard in the public square” and possesses, by her very nature, a “prophetic authority”. Then he became remarkably explicit, he told the bishops to defend the Church’s freedom: “to evangelize, to educate about true freedom, and to worship publicly, so that charity may be exercised visibly in the name of Jesus Christ.” Read that again in the context of modern France. The state may be secular. The Church emphatically is not. Laïcité cannot mean that Catholicism is permitted to survive only as private spirituality, safely contained behind church doors and forbidden from attempting to convert, educate or influence the culture around it. And Leo went further, he told French Catholics to “reclaim their heritage of faith”. Christianity, in other words, is not some foreign intrusion into French society. Leo reminded the bishops that the Church helped build France, profoundly shaping its culture, art, education and understanding of the human person. So what should the Church do now that France has become one of the most secularised societies in Europe? Leo’s answer could hardly be clearer: “There is only one ‘roadmap,’ which is always the same: to make Jesus Christ known and loved, authentically, passionately, again and again.” That's a really powerful sentence! And then at Mass in Lourdes the language became even stronger. “Today, not tomorrow,” Leo said, is the time to repent. He recalled Our Lady’s words to Bernadette: “Penance! Penance! Penance!” And, in a France currently wrestling with profound questions about assisted dying, he warned against attempts “to redefine the value of human life in illness, suffering and old age”. There are still subjects I want to hear Leo address more directly: abortion, euthanasia, marriage, demographic decline, Islam and the enormous challenge of integration. But the direction of this visit is now unmistakable: reclaim France’s Christian inheritance, defend the Church’s place in public life, call people to repentance and proclaim Christ without embarrassment. Not a strategy for managing Christianity’s decline, a roadmap for reversing it.