During his visit to France in September 2026, Robert Prevost held a speech in Paris to the state authorities in the Elysée Palace, where he mentioned the motto “Liberty, equality, fraternity” of the French Revolution and praised its ideals. In the speech, he said:
“France is a land with deep Christian roots. From the time of Saint Irenaeus and the baptism of Clovis, the soul of the nation has drawn from Christianity a rich spiritual, cultural, intellectual, artistic and missionary élan that continues to be felt in our world today.”
The old coat-of-arms of France in a church in Malta. By Lawrence Lew OP, CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0, here.
Yes, for example the work of the Paris Foreign Missions Society (Société des Missions Etrangères de Paris, MEP), founded in 1658, whose priest members spread the Catholic faith in East Asia. France was once called the “eldest daughter of the Church”.
“So it was that humanism flourished in sixteenth century France, as a means of uniting the heritage of classical Greece and Rome with the Christian faith. With the great thinkers of the Renaissance, and later of the Grand Siècle, succeeded by those of the Enlightenment, France was responsible for significant advances in our world, including the recognition of human rights grounded in the nature of the human person, particularly religious freedom.”
Actually, the popes before the Second Vatican Council said that religious freedom is not a human right. To be clear, the “right to religious freedom” is understood as follows: everyone has the right to follow whatever religion he wants in private and in public, without state interference, as long as he does not disturb the public peace. The popes explained that there is no God-given human right to exercise a false religion even if one keeps the public peace.
The “right to religious freedom” is different from religious tolerance, which means that the state tolerates the exercise of false religions, without acknowledging that there is a God-given right to practice those religions. The Church has no problem with religious tolerance, see Libertas by Pope Leo XIII.
Since human rights ultimately come from God, let’s put it this way: Can God give human beings the right to worship in a false religion?
The right to religious freedom was condemned by Gregory XVI in Mirari Vos, Pius IX in the Syllabus Errorum and Leo XIII in Libertas. Given that this teaching was repeated, it is clear that it forms part of the Ordinary Magisterium and is thus infallible.
The most important document here is Quanta Cura by Pius IX, published in 1864. In it, the pope writes: ‘And, against the doctrine of Scripture, of the Church, and of the Holy Fathers, they do not hesitate to assert that “that is the best condition of civil society, in which no duty is recognized, as attached to the civil power, of restraining by enacted penalties, offenders against the Catholic religion, except so far as public peace may require.’ From which totally false idea of social government they do not fear to foster that erroneous opinion, most fatal in its effects on the Catholic Church and the salvation of souls, called by Our Predecessor, Gregory XVI, an ‘insanity,’ viz., that ‘liberty of conscience and worship is each man’s personal right, which ought to be legally proclaimed and asserted in every rightly constituted society; and that a right resides in the citizens to an absolute liberty, which should be restrained by no authority whether ecclesiastical or civil, whereby they may be able openly and publicly to manifest and declare any of their ideas whatever, either by word of mouth, by the press, or in any other way.’”
The language of the pope at the end of the document, where he says that by his “Apostolic authority, we reprobate, proscribe, and condemn all the singular and evil opinions and doctrines severally mentioned in this letter, and will and command that they be thoroughly held by all children of the Catholic Church as reprobated, proscribed and condemned” (6) strongly suggests that this document was ex cathedra.
On the other hand, the document “Dignitatis Humanae” of the Second Vatican Council confirmed such a right to religious freedom. And the “popes” after the Council have again and again affirmed such a non-existent right, such as “John Paul II” in Redemptor hominis 17.
“This constant focus on the dignity inherent in every person is echoed in your national motto. Liberty, equality and fraternity are not simply words emblazoned on the front of your public buildings; they refer to universal ethical imperatives that also find in the Gospel message an inexhaustible source of inspiration and fulfillment.”
This is very problematic: The French Revolution didn’t just oppose the monarchy, but also violently opposed the Catholic Church. At least thousands of priests, religious and laypeople were martyred during the revolution and the following reign of terror.
St. Pius X beatified the 16 Carmelite Martyrs of Compiègne and Benedict XV beatified 11 Ursuline nuns. Pius XI beatified 32 Martyrs of Orange and 191 other martyrs of September 1792. “John Paul II” beatified 64 of the over 500 priests who died on a prison ship by Rocheport and 99 of the Martyrs of Anjou.
The idea that a “pope” would praise the French Revolution would have been unthinkable before the 1960s.
Jean-Baptiste Lallemand – La prise de la Bastille, le 14 juillet 1789
Popes have already referenced the words “liberty, equality, fraternity” before, but they had something radically different to say about it than Prevost. Here is Leo XIII writing in Humanum Genus, one of his encyclicals against Freemasonry:
“Amongst the many benefits to be expected from it [the Third Order of Saint Francis] will be the great benefit of drawing the minds of men to liberty, fraternity, and equality of right; not such as the Freemasons absurdly imagine, but such as Jesus Christ obtained for the human race and St. Francis aspired to: the liberty, We mean, of sons of God, through which we may be free from slavery to Satan or to our passions, both of them most wicked masters; the fraternity whose origin is in God, the common Creator and Father of all; the equality which, founded on justice and charity, does not take away all distinctions among men, but, out of the varieties of life, of duties, and of pursuits, forms that union and that harmony which naturally tend to the benefit and dignity of society.” (Humanum Genus 34)
In other words, Leo XIII is emphasizing here liberty from sin; fraternity as children of God; and equality of the people in harmony.
On the subject of fraternity, we can mention a document by St. Pius X, which has a French title and was written about a French self-declared Catholic political movement called Sillon. It was titled “Notre charge apostolique” and in it, he mentions the motto disapprovingly, and says about the movement:
“When we consider the forces, knowledge, and supernatural virtues which are necessary to establish the Christian City, and the sufferings of millions of martyrs, and the light given by the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, and the self-sacrifice of all the heroes of charity, and a powerful hierarchy ordained in heaven, and the streams of Divine Grace – the whole having been built up, bound together, and impregnated by the life and spirit of Jesus Christ, the Wisdom of God, the Word made man – when we think, I say, of all this, it is frightening to behold new apostles eagerly attempting to do better by a common interchange of vague idealism and civic virtues. What are they going to produce? What is to come of this collaboration? A mere verbal and chimerical construction in which we shall see, glowing in a jumble, and in seductive confusion, the words Liberty, Justice, Fraternity, Love, Equality, and human exultation, all resting upon an ill-understood human dignity.”
“We fear that worse is to come: the end result of this developing promiscuousness, the beneficiary of this cosmopolitan social action, can only be a Democracy which will be neither Catholic, nor Protestant, nor Jewish. It will be a religion (for Sillonism, so the leaders have said, is a religion) more universal than the Catholic Church, uniting all men become brothers and comrades at last in the “Kingdom of God”. – ‘We do not work for the Church, we work for mankind.’”