Last week, hundreds of thousands of young Catholics from around the world converged on the Portuguese capital Lisbon for World Youth Day, an international religious gathering that first took place in Rome in 1986. In a sermon delivered in the city on August 3, Pope Francis reminded those present that “in the Church there is room for everyone”. More than 42,000 of the 354,000 pilgrims were from France (the fourth- largest national contingent after Spaniards, Italians and Portuguese). And a poll of young French Catholics planning to travel to Lisbon published in May, in the religious newspaper La Croix, suggests that they might not have been especially receptive to Francis’s expansive ecclesiastical vision.

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