The Elysée's proposal was cut short. At the end of the evening, when Pope Leo XIV is to celebrate on September 25th in the late afternoon at Notre-Dame de Paris, there will be no side conversation with the French president, Emmanuel Macron, who would have wished to personally present the restoration work of the cathedral, launched after the fire of April 15 and 16, 2019, as well as the tradespeople who contributed to the construction site. According to information from La Croix, confirmed by Le Monde, the Holy See politely declined. Officially, the pope's program was too full. Unofficially, he did not wish for a moment that would recall the lavish inauguration of the cathedral in late 2024, in the presence of several dozen heads of state and a string of billionaires, including Elon Musk.
Furthermore, when one glides to Rome, one does not show a place of worship to a pope as if it were the Louvre or a historical monument. "The 'at the same time' – appearing alongside the pope at Notre-Dame while voting on a law on end-of-life, which contradicts the Church's positions – came to crash into the 'we cannot'," summarizes historian Camille Pascal, former advisor to Nicolas Sarkozy and Jean Castex.
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