Monday, September 28, 2026 · Independent editorial

One cannot speak of Europe

Pope Leo XIV told Europe it cannot tell its own story and leave Christianity out. A day earlier, at Lourdes, he called assisted-suicide laws a false compassion. Simon Kent’s report and Kurt Zindulka’s report are the sources. Heritage is not a museum label if the sick are still being offered death as mercy.

Breitbart reports the U.S.-born pope wound up the fourth and final day of his France visit in Metz with a speech urging the continent to remember its Christian heritage and embrace it after nearly two thousand years of the faith on European soil. “One cannot speak of Europe without mentioning Christianity,” he said. He praised European integration as a social and political necessity and urged E.U. leaders to give real substance to words such as freedom democracy and unity and told Jewish Muslim Protestant and Orthodox leaders gathered before him that Europe has flourished and progressed when it has been able to draw on the best aspects of its past and reinvent them in new and creative ways through encounters with others. Kent notes the message lands while surging mass illegal migration still troubles every nation and that adult and teenage baptisms in France hit record levels this year up 20 percent over 2025 after 800,000 met Leo at Mass on Paris’s Place de la Concorde. On Sunday at Lourdes Kurt Zindulka’s Breitbart report carried Leo’s condemnation of assisted suicide and euthanasia as false compassion just weeks after France’s aid-in-dying law took effect. The ill are not a burden he said but the beating heart of our humanity and a precious treasure for the Church. “It is precisely in the name of this inalienable dignity of the human person that we must reject the temptation to cause death under the guise of false compassion,” Leo said. “What is legal is not necessarily moral.” He appealed to healthcare workers to care for a suffering person not eliminate that person and warned that no one ever has the right on the basis of laboratory algorithms to decide the life of a given embryo or elderly person and that medicine must never become the servant of programmed death. A midterm is not Metz. A presser is not Thou shalt not murder.

Being a Christian in America this week is refusing to confuse a heritage speech with nostalgia and refusing to confuse false compassion with care. Keep the roots. Keep the sick and the unborn. And do not confuse a midterm with Pope Leo telling Europe one cannot speak of Europe without mentioning Christianity.

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