Pope Leo XIV used the opening of his visit to France to draw a line between technological progress and what he portrayed as its commercial misuse. Speaking at the Élysée Palace, he said science and technology can improve lives, but warned against social trends that could turn them into ventures “driven by profit.”¹

The pope’s critique focused on practices he said risk treating human life as a commodity: genetic manipulation, surrogacy, organ trafficking and the prospect of arranging one’s own death.² His message was both a broad ethical argument about innovation and a pointed intervention in France’s debate over euthanasia and assisted suicide, which Catholic teaching opposes.

Leo contrasted a market-led approach with an obligation shared by every citizen: “Respect for one another and the protection of all human life is a duty incumbent upon each and every one of us.”² He also argued that the same standard should guide artificial intelligence, invoking writer Georges Bernanos’s warning of a possible “paradise of machines” in which people surrender responsibility to technology.¹

His address also offered a more conciliatory reading of France’s strict secular tradition. Rather than asking the state to abandon laïcité, Leo said authentic secularism should not exclude religion from public life or education, but preserve dialogue between state and religious institutions in service of the common good.³

That position places the pope’s intervention on two tracks at once: a defence of religiously informed ethical limits on biotechnology and end-of-life decisions, and an appeal for faith-based voices to remain part of France’s civic conversation. In remarks before the pope’s speech, President Emmanuel Macron described France as a country shaped by freedom, intellect and continual debate.²