ORSAY, France (AP) — Ice. Urgently and in large quantities.
At a Paris-region hospital, emergency medics needed it to plunge patients into cold-water baths to speedily bring down their temperatures so they wouldn't join the growing tally of dead from a record-smashing heat wave. But lacking an ice-making machine, where to get it?
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A nurse prepares a bed at the emergency department of the Paris-Saclay Hospital, outside Paris, Tuesday June 30, 2026. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena )
A heat-protection is set on a window at the emergency department of the Paris-Saclay Hospital, outside Paris, Tuesday June 30, 2026. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena )
A patient waits before being treated at the emergency department of the Paris-Saclay Hospital, outside Paris, Tuesday June 30, 2026. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena )
Paramedics take a patient to the emergency department of the Paris-Saclay Hospital, outside Paris, Tuesday June 30, 2026. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena )
Doctors and nurses take care of a patient at the emergency department of the Paris-Saclay Hospital, outside Paris, Tuesday June 30, 2026. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena )
A fast-food restaurant helped out last week, saying the hospital could take its ice. Staff also bought ice from the supermarket. The Paris-Saclay Hospital has now ordered its own ice machine, eagerly awaited in the emergency department for a future attack of sizzling heat.
Whether that hits next week, as France's weather service says it might, or in summer months ahead, medics and hospital administrators are acutely aware that the battle they've just endured will, because of climate change, be followed by others. Just as they brace for the annual flu season, they know that fighting heat waves is becoming their new normal.
So as they catch their breath from what the director of the public hospital described as a “horrible" last week, he and his staff are also gearing up for the next round.
“We thought we were ready. We were not actually,” said the director, Cédric Lussiez.
“The hospital was working on a 24 hours a day basis because we had to find new solutions in a very short delay,” he said. “We already learned some lessons.”
Efforts to plug some of the holes exposed by the heat wave that shifted eastward to other parts of Europe after battering France, the United Kingdom and other countries are accelerating on a national level, too.
When France was baking through its hottest days on record last week, French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu announced a 100-million euro ($114-million) spend from this summer on cooling systems for hospitals and other work to keep wards functioning.
And at the latest in a series of heat-wave crisis meetings, he said Monday that the government is buying 30,000 air-conditioning units for health facilities, with the first deliveries expected “at the end of the week, beginning of next week.”
“It's an absolute priority for us that, if the heat wave returns, the hospital situation be a lot less strained," he said.
The World Health Organization on Tuesday described the heat wave as “a dress rehearsal” for summers that “will be harder."
“Europe is warming at more than twice the global average. Heat waves are no longer one-off freak events,” it said. “Every summer we fail to prepare for them is a summer we pay for in lives.”
At the Paris-Saclay Hospital, patients suffering from heat exposure started arriving in a surge on June 20, said Dr. Nicolas Gonzales, head of the emergency department.
“It was like a big mountain,” he said. “It was like that for seven days. So it was very intense.”
“In winter, we know we’ll have influenza epidemics and probably COVID as well. And now, in the summer, we’re going to have the climate crisis," he said.
The first patient he treated in this heat wave was an emergency call-out, for a 50-year-old man in a coma at home and with a temperature of about 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit). His family said he seemed fine one minute, but was unconscious the next, Gonzales said. He was rushed to the hospital for critical care.
Then came the flood: heart attacks, dehydration, kidney malfunctions and other heat-related problems, impacting all age groups, from children to older people living alone.
“Heat is a physical assault. It is a physical assault on the body," Gonzales said. “And when the body can no longer adapt — or, unfortunately, is no longer able to fight off that assault — you don’t feel it coming, and the heart can stop beating."
Paris-Saclay Hospital is new and has air-conditioning, but three older hospitals that are part of its group, which Lussiez heads, aren’t so well defended against the heat. It tested them arduously.
To prevent medicines from spoiling, they had to be cooled with a temporary solution of electric fans and blocks of ice. Student nurses were recruited to help with the work of keeping patients hydrated. The thermometer hit 33 C (91 F) on the top, most exposed floor of a psychiatric unit, Lussiez said.
He's now urgently equipping that unit with a cool room for patients on each floor and organizing other renovation works and changes, including moving a department for elderly patients to the new hospital.
“We’ll be in a better situation next week than we were last week,” he said.
Associated Press journalist Alex Turnbull contributed.
A nurse prepares a bed at the emergency department of the Paris-Saclay Hospital, outside Paris, Tuesday June 30, 2026. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena )
A heat-protection is set on a window at the emergency department of the Paris-Saclay Hospital, outside Paris, Tuesday June 30, 2026. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena )
A patient waits before being treated at the emergency department of the Paris-Saclay Hospital, outside Paris, Tuesday June 30, 2026. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena )
Paramedics take a patient to the emergency department of the Paris-Saclay Hospital, outside Paris, Tuesday June 30, 2026. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena )
Doctors and nurses take care of a patient at the emergency department of the Paris-Saclay Hospital, outside Paris, Tuesday June 30, 2026. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena )
ECONE, Switzerland (AP) — A breakaway group of traditionalist Catholics on Wednesday directly defied Pope Leo XIV by celebrating an ancient Latin Mass to consecrate four bishops without his consent, dismissing the threat of schism and excommunication and justifying their actions as a “sacred duty” to defend the Catholic faith.
Bells tolled through the mountain valley of Econe, Switzerland, as the Society of St. Pius X began the solemn ceremony at its seminary. Thousands of people, faithful Catholics who prefer the traditional Latin Mass over modern liturgies, filled the field under cloudy skies as the incense-led procession of hundreds of priests approached the altar under a tent.
The orderly, solemn ceremony, accompanied by organ music and livestreamed on the society's YouTube channel, went ahead despite a last-ditch appeal by Leo to call it off. In a letter published Tuesday, the American pope warned that consecrating bishops without his approval amounts to a “sin of extreme gravity” that will actually harm their faithful.
And yet at the start of the Mass, a priest read aloud a statement justifying the consecrations as a necessary defense of the faith and criticizing how the Catholic Church today had deviated from tradition.
“Therefore before God we consider it a sacred duty towards Holy Church and towards souls to proceed with the consecration of bishops who are entirely faithful to her holy tradition and to her constant magisterium,” the priest said. “We consider every punishment and censure brought to bear against this step will have no validity.”
According to church law, the mere act of consecrating a bishop without a papal mandate incurs the harshest penalty in the Catholic Church: automatic excommunication for the four new bishops and the bishop administering the rite. It also amounts to a schismatic act, or an intentional rupture of the unity of the Catholic Church.
And yet everything about Wednesday’s ceremony had the air of a joyous celebration. The website for its consecration has had a countdown clock running for days. Video clips show seminarians joyfully unloading boxes. Participants received a baseball cap with the “Econe2026” seal on it.
The field, located under giant power lines, was awash in smiling nuns, priests posing for photos, girl scouts handing out water bottles, black-clad security guards with earpieces and orange-vested volunteer escorts keeping journalists on a short leash. Morning mist coated the nearby Rhone River that snakes through the Alpine valley as worshippers flocked in.
And in perhaps the most obvious sign of a celebration, registered participants were able to purchase a souvenir set of wine to commemorate the “historic” event. The 75 Swiss franc ($92.50) “Cuvee des Sacres” gift box features pinot noir, Syrah, Petit Arvine and Fendant, each bottle with a bishop-themed label: an image of a bishop’s pointed miter hat, his ring, cross or crozier staff.
For the society, known by its acronym SSPX, neither the threat of a declared schism nor an excommunication matters. The SSPX believes it alone is upholding church tradition and the Catholic faith.
“We don’t fear it. It pains us immensely, but we believe that the good we seek is greater than the pain that will be inflicted upon us,” said Marc-André Mabillard, media manager for the society.
In a late response to Leo's letter, the SSPX superior, the Rev. Davide Pagliarani, urged Leo to wait before declaring any penalty.
The ceremony took place 38 years to the day after the Vatican declared the last consecrations of SSPX bishops a “schismatic act” that incurred automatic excommunication for the bishops.
The French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre had founded the ultratraditionalist SSPX in opposition to the modernizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council. Among other things, the 1960s church meetings revolutionized the Catholic Church’s relations with other Christians, Jews and people of other faiths, and allowed Mass to be celebrated in the vernacular rather than Latin.
Today, the SSPX celebrates the ancient Latin Mass and has accused the modern church of being rife with heresies and errors, including modernism, liberalism and ecumenism. The society insists that only the SSPX is upholding the true faith of Christ and has justified the consecrations, citing a “state of necessity” to minister to its faithful.
But many Catholics, including conservative and traditional ones, are opposed to the consecrations, viewing them as an act of severe disobedience to the pope that hurts the church.
“You can’t serve tradition while disobeying the church and her authority,” said the Rev. Robert Gahl, an ethics expert at the Catholic University of America.
The St. John Paul II biographer, George Weigel, has written that the SSPX-Vatican divide is about far more than just whether Mass is celebrated in Latin or English.
It’s about “a rejection of the Second Vatican Council’s teaching on the church, salvation, religious freedom, church–state relations, and the church’s relationship to other religions,” Weigel wrote recently in First Things magazine.
Weigel recalled that Lefebvre was a supporter of the “collaborationist" Vichy regime in France during World War II. One of its original SSPX bishops denied the Holocaust.
The SSPX has justified the consecrations by invoking a “state of necessity.” The group says that with only two of the original four bishops surviving, it simply needs more bishops to tend to the needs of a faith community that counts 800 places of worship in 77 countries.
The group denies that the consecration is a rejection of Leo’s authority or a challenge to his power. Rather, it says the creation of four new bishops is solely to be able to ordain new priests and preside over confirmation ceremonies according to the ancient rite.
The SSPX has identified the new bishops as Pascal Schreiber of Switzerland, Michael Goldade of the United States, Michel Poinsinet de Sivry of France and Marc Hanappier, also of France.
In response to the pope’s letter, Mabillard, media manager for the society, expressed “great sadness to not be understood by our leader,” and added: “We are changing absolutely nothing in our plans.”
Winfield contributed from Rome.
Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.
Faithful wait for the start of a consecration ceremony for four new bishops, outside a tent set up outside the Society of St. Pius X seminary, in Econe, Switzerland, Wednesday, July 1, 2026. (AP Photo/Baz Ratner)
Priests prepare miters and pastoral staffs before the start of a consecration ceremony for four new bishops, in a tent set up outside the Society of St. Pius X seminary, in Econe, Switzerland, Wednesday, July 1, 2026. (AP Photo/Baz Ratner)
Pope Leo XIV leaves after a Mass where he conferred the pallium on newly appointed metropolitan archbishops, in St. Peter's Basilica, at the Vatican, Monday, June 29, 2026. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)
Pope Leo XIV waves during the Angelus noon prayer from the window of his studio overlooking St.Peter's Square, at the Vatican, Monday, June 29, 2026. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)
Pope Leo XIV leaves after a Mass where he conferred the pallium on newly appointed metropolitan archbishops, in St. Peter's Basilica, at the Vatican, Monday, June 29, 2026. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)
