By Regis Martin
Crisis Magazine
November 24, 2025
During the 27 years Karol Wojtyla reigned as Christ's Vicar on earth, an unprecedented tenure beginning in 1978 and ending with his death in 2005, he managed to accomplish a great many things, not the least being countless pastoral visits (129 to be exact) around the globe, including places which had only the most tenuous connection to Catholic-Christianity. But of all those lands and countries touched by the papal presence, there were three in particular that he needed to see more than once.
These were Poland, his native land, to which he would go nine times, in large part to help bring about the end of Soviet hegemony in Europe. This was followed by France, eldest daughter of the Church, to which he would go eight times, raising repeatedly the matter of her baptismal promises. Finally, there was the United States, of course, a nation no pope could ill-afford not to visit, which he did seven times, reminding us each time not to forget where our freedoms came from and why.
But setting aside Poland and the United States, as important as those visits were, it seems to me that the eight visits to France represent perhaps the most consequential exercise of all-in terms, that is, of trying to reorient the soul of France back to God, to that absolute attraction for whom we all lost a very long time ago thanks to the sin of Adam.
And pursuant to that end, he would unfailingly point to the sacrament of baptism as the necessary means, the perfect point of entry, as it were, in the Church's effort to reignite in the soul precisely that primal attraction which Original Sin had nearly wiped out altogether. And not only within the individual soul, as though one's relation to God were a purely private affair, but in the outward forms of life as well, which equally evince hunger and thirst for God, for that wholeness of life which only baptism can bring. Here we see the enduring relevance of that larger and more public dimension to human life which we rightly call culture.
Faith, in other words, whose very enfleshment creates culture, becomes the key ingredient in human history. "A society which has lost its religion," Christopher Dawson warns, "becomes sooner or later a society which has lost its culture." And because it is of the very essence of faith to wish to raise up all that has to do with man, including the social order, and thus elevate it all onto the plane of glory, the Church cannot remain indifferent to culture, cannot leave it in its wounded and unredeemed state.
But why did the pope think it necessary to go to France quite so often? Eight visits to a country clearly and undeniably in decline, indeed, in a kind of moral and, yes, even demographic freefall? Why all the attention? Why not simply write it off as yet another failed state, not unlike so many third-world implosions we regularly hear about on the news? Might it have something to do with her being "the eldest daughter of the Church"? And what does that tell us about her place in the economy of grace? I mean, does the honorific still apply if a nation appears to have fallen into apostasy?
But that is just the point, isn't it? France really is the purest distillate of what postmodern man actually looks like. It is not a pretty sight. A nation without God will inevitably turn on itself, divesting its people of those protections guaranteed by God. And so if the Church were to succeed in calling France back to the source of her greatness, her identity in Christ, arresting thereby her fall into infidelity, how wonderfully contagious might her return then prove to be in bringing other erstwhile Catholic nations back to God.
It is well to remind ourselves that it was on his very first visit, in May of 1980, that the Holy Father spoke of France in a way unlike any other nation, reminding her of history's high regard for her role as the eldest of all the Church's daughters. And why is that? Because, owing to her having been the very first among the peoples of Europe to embrace the Faith and the hope of Jesus Christ, she is not only entitled to wear that particular crown but she has also been most earnestly enjoined by Christ to give witness to that fact by evangelizing others.
And what use had she made of it but to spread the message of Christ far and wide, urging her pagan neighbors to go and do likewise. Did it especially please the people of France, I wonder, to have received such a warm congratulatory message from the pope and Bishop of Rome?
He would again stoke that particular flame of French pride when, in 1996, he returned to celebrate 1,500 years of her Catholic-Christian identity. On that day spent celebrating the great jubilee of the baptism of the Frankish King Clovis in the year 496, he particularly commended France for her missionary outreach to the world, for producing so rich a repository of saints and martyrs along the way.
But then, just as the pope was about to conclude his panegyric, the mood suddenly changed. "Dear France," he began,
permit me to ask this question. We are here to celebrate the fifteenth centenary of a baptism, which you like to think of as your baptism, as the baptism of France. What have you done with your baptism? What has become of it? What have you made of your baptism?
Now there's an icebreaker for you. And not a few of the French who were there felt the sting of it-including most especially the President of France himself, Jacques Chirac, who had been at great pains in welcoming the Holy Father in the name of a "republican and secular France," thus erasing an entire millennium and a half of French history.
If the event of a king's baptism, his putting on Christ both for himself and for all those disparate tribes whom divine providence entrusted him to unite and look after, is not to be dismissed as unreal and therefore unimportant, then it is a huge historical mistake not to acknowledge the connection. It shows how vastly ignorant so much of France is of her own past. Between governance and God, human culture and Christian faith, a nexus had long ago been struck, the fruit of which became Western Christian Civilization. By not knowing that fact, or by heaping scorn and derision upon it, France has made the most egregious confession of ignorance. She has uprooted the very tree in whose branches she had been sitting for centuries.
It was in August of the following year, 1997, that the pope would return to his eldest daughter, traveling this time to Paris for World Youth Day, during which he would strike a very different note. There he spoke to many thousands of eager young pilgrims.
"Do you know," he asked them, "what the sacrament of baptism does to you?" He told them:
It means that God acknowledges you as his children and transforms your existence into a story of love with him. He conforms you to Christ so that you will be able to fulfill your personal vocation. He has come to make a pact with you and he offers you his peace. Live from now on as children of the light who know that they are reconciled by the Cross of the Savior!
What might the young people of France yet do with their baptismal promises? And what are we going to do with ours?
This article was originally published on Crisis Magazine.