Pope Leo XIV in France to find a secular country at odds with Catholic teaching on life

VATICAN CITY (AP) — When an ailing Pope John Paul II visited the French shrine at Lourdes in 2004, on his last foreign trip, he delivered a forceful condemnation of abortion and euthanasia as he gasped for air during Mass.

Pope Leo XIV is expected to make a similar appeal to protect life when he visits France this weekend and also prays at Lourdes. One of Christianity’s most-visited pilgrimage destinations is especially popular for sick people because of its association with miraculous cures.

Leo’s message will likely land differently, since France’s National Assembly in 2024 enshrined abortion as a constitutional right and recently gave final approval to a bill allowing adults with incurable illnesses to receive lethal medication. It was the culmination of years of debate over end-of-life care in France and comes as other countries in Europe and the Americas have increasingly legalized assisted dying, though British lawmakers recently voted down a bill allowing it.

Catholic teaching holds that life must be defended from conception until natural death. It insists that chronically ill patients, including those in vegetative states, must receive “ordinary” care such as hydration and nutrition, but that “extraordinary” or disproportionate care can be suspended if it is only prolonging a precarious and painful life.

With Leo’s blessing, French bishops decided the official motto of his trip would be “That the world may have life,” suggesting that protecting human life and human dignity will be an overarching theme of the visit.

Leo has emphasized the need to protect the dignity of all human life, from immigrants to the sick and unborn, most significantly in his inaugural encyclical on safeguarding human dignity in the age of artificial intelligence.

Cardinal Jean-Marc Aveline, president of the bishops’ conference, said he expected Leo would raise the issue. “We already know that the question of life and respect for life — not only from an ethical standpoint, but in many ways — is at the heart of the pope’s message and aligns very closely with the message of the Gospel.”

France is a traditionally Catholic country, but adheres to a strict form of secularism in public life based on a 1905 law separating church and state.

And like many countries in the once-traditionally Christian West, France has seen the influence of the Catholic Church wane amid secularizing trends and the impact of the clergy sexual abuse scandal on its credibility.

Yet French bishops have expressed astonishment at the level of interest in the pope’s Sept. 25-28 visit and say they expect 1 million people will see him. Due to larger-than-expected crowds, organizers lengthened the perimeter for Leo's main Mass at the central Place de la Concorde, extending the site beyond the 1.9-kilometer (1.2-mile) length of the Champs-Elysees where he'll parade down in his popemobile.

Leo elicited a similar level of interest in secular Spain in June, where he received a seven-minute standing ovation after his speech to the Spanish Parliament.

“I think nobody many months ago or a few months ago would have imagined” the level of interest, said Sister Nathalie Becquart, a top Vatican official from France. “But they see what happened in Spain.”

Like Spain, France has seen a trend of new adult baptisms in recent years, particularly among conservative young adults, many of whom are attracted to more traditional forms of worship including the old Latin Mass.

More than 13,000 adults were baptized at Easter this year in France, where the number of adult baptisms has more than tripled since 2016, the French bishops’ conference reported. Leo will meet with some of these new converts in a special audience.

But experts caution these numbers don't counteract the overall generational trend of the children of practicing French Catholics no longer going to Mass or baptizing their babies.

In 1980, there were 513,000 baptisms in France; in 2024, a total of 186,000. “The new phenomenon of adult baptisms is put into perspective; in fact, it represents only a very modest rebound,” said Christian Marquant, a traditionalist Catholic who blames the secularizing crisis in the French church on the modernizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council.

Leo is bookending his trip to France with two events to broaden his message to an international audience. On Day 1, he visits UNESCO to speak about artificial intelligence and the value of education and art.

In his AI encyclical “Magnificent Humanity,” Leo called for robust AI regulation and for developers to slow down — a stance they have recently taken as a group. Leo's position on AI has put him at odds with the Trump administration, which has encouraged AI innovation so the U.S. can compete with and surpass China.

The visit to UNESCO by the American pope is significant, given the Trump administration has once again announced it is withdrawing from the U.N. cultural agency, part of its broader retreat from international organizations.

On his final day, Sept. 28, Leo will visit the northern French city of Metz, the birthplace of Robert Schuman, one of the founding fathers of European integration.

Leo will participate in a meeting with other faith leaders and then speak at a European conference on peace, at a time of war in Ukraine and beyond.

The Vatican took the unusual step of announcing ahead of time that Leo would meet with victims of clergy sexual abuse while in France. The gathering of seven survivors includes one who was an adult when abused, a recognition of the new frontier of the abuse crisis facing the church.

The French church has endured a brutal reckoning with its legacy of abuse. An independent report in 2021 estimated 330,000 children had been abused over 70 years by some 3,000 priests and church workers.

Despite criticism of the report's methodology and conclusions, French bishops nevertheless put in place an independent system of compensation for victims that to date has recommended the church pay out more than 20 million euros.

In Lourdes, Leo will be reminded of a prickly abuse case inherited from Pope Francis.

The façade of one of the Lourdes basilicas was designed by the Rev. Marko Rupnik, one of the Catholic Church’s most famous mosaic artists.

Rupnik is currently on trial in a Vatican court, accused by more than two dozen women of having psychologically, spiritually and sexually abused them starting in the 1990s, including during the creation of his artworks.

His case was covered up for three decades by his Jesuit superiors, and even Francis was suspected of having protected his fellow Jesuit. Amid a media outcry, Francis in 2024 ordered a canonical trial, which is ongoing.

The Rupnik case posed the question of what to do with his mosaics, which adorn basilicas around the world.

In 2024, Lourdes Bishop Jean-Marc Micas decided to no longer illuminate the façade of the Notre Dame du Rosaire Basilica at night. He subsequently ordered the decorated doors covered, and more recently decided to cover the façade’s mosaics entirely. He reasoned that abuse victims who come to Lourdes for healing shouldn't be forced to see them.

Since some of the abuse was allegedly committed during the creation of the mosaics, “it is impossible to separate the work of art from the abuse,” said Laura Sgro, attorney for five women who accused Rupnik and have welcomed Micas' decision to cover the mosaics.

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.

FILE - Pope John Paul II prays, at the Virgin Mary shrine cave prior to his departure to Rome in Lourdes, southwestern France, Sunday Aug. 15, 2004. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena, File)

FILE - People enter the Notre-Dame-du-Rosaire basilica in Lourdes, southwestern France, Tuesday Sept. 8, 2026 . (AP Photo/Fred Scheiber, File)

FILE - Pope Benedict XVI, center, celebrates a Mass in front of the Basilica of the Rosary in Lourdes, southwestern France, on Sept. 15, 2008. Behind him is one of the mosaics by Rev. Marko Ivan Rupnik, who was declared excommunicated in 2020 for committing one of the worst crimes in church law – using the confessional to absolve a woman with whom he had engaged in sexual activity. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino, File)

FILE - French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte arrive in the St. Damasus Courtyard at the Vatican to meet with Pope Leo XIV, Friday, April 10, 2026. (AP Photo/Andrew Medichini, File)

FILE - Pope Leo XIV celebrates a mass at the Basilica Sanctuary of the Mother of Good Counsel in Genazzano, central Italy, Monday, Sept. 7, 2026. (AP Photo/Andrew Medichini, File)

ATLANTA--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sep 21, 2026--

KMS Technology, a global, AI-native technology services company, introduced Troy Cantrell as its Field Chief Technology Officer. In this role, Cantrell will work directly with enterprise leaders and KMS global delivery teams to advance the company's Enterprise Execution strategy: turning AI-native ideas into validated, production-grade business outcomes.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260918794730/en/

Cantrell brings 25 years of enterprise technology leadership spanning large-scale ERP programs, ServiceNow implementations, and AI and innovation initiatives. Throughout his career, he has focused on a consistent challenge: accountability for what happens after go-live.

"Across every major technology shift, the hardest work begins after the system goes live," Cantrell said. "With ERP, the question was whether the business could operate successfully once the implementation team left. With ServiceNow, it was whether people trusted the workflows enough to run their operations through them. AI is the latest and highest-stakes version of that challenge. Someone has to own whether AI actually works in production, under real conditions — not just in a demo."

His appointment comes as generative AI dramatically accelerates the creation of code, prototypes, and agentic workflows while introducing new demands around validation, governance, security, and operational reliability.

"AI has made it faster and less expensive to create, but it has not made production readiness easier," Cantrell said. "The bottleneck has shifted from whether an organization can build something to whether it can execute responsibly at scale. Many enterprises are still structured and resourced for the first problem."

The frustration surfaces most directly in conversations with security and infrastructure leaders, Cantrell said. "I have sat in many conversations with CISOs where they tell me they are tired of paying millions in licensing fees, then being told they are only using 20% of the platforms they invest in."

Advancing Enterprise Execution

Enterprise Execution is the discipline of turning AI-native intent into reliable, validated, and production-ready outcomes across the software and AI delivery lifecycle. It brings engineering, quality, governance, and operations together as a continuous discipline rather than treating validation as a final project phase.

Cantrell said that naming the discipline is what turns it into real work. "When you don't name a problem, nobody owns it, nobody budgets for it, and nobody measures it," he said. "Giving it a name turns it into a real workstream with real accountability instead of something everyone assumes will just sort itself out."

In his new role, Cantrell will work with clients to identify high-value business problems, build outcome-based technology roadmaps, and establish the controls and measurements required to move AI initiatives into production. He will also help connect insights from client engagements with KMS's global engineering and delivery capabilities.

"A traditional CTO looks inward — one company, one roadmap, one engineering organization to build and protect. A Field CTO looks outward," Cantrell said. "My role is to understand what is breaking in a client's business, work with our delivery teams to determine what will solve it, and stress-test our thinking against real constraints, legacy systems, and deadlines. I don't get the luxury of a whiteboard-only version of the truth."

Cantrell will also support the continued development of KMS's Enterprise Execution playbooks, which guide how work is identified, prioritized, built, validated, measured, and re-engineered, with defined gates and sign-off at each stage. KMS applies these operating practices within its own organization before bringing them into client environments.

"We take ownership at the point where many partners hand over the keys," Cantrell said. "Creating AI-native work is only part of the job. We are engineers, not just consultants — we think about governance and cost of ownership, and enterprises need a partner willing to stand behind whether it performs safely, correctly, and at scale once it is carrying real business weight. When we take ownership of a client's execution problem, we are not experimenting on them; we are applying something we have already proven on ourselves."

Building from Business Outcomes

The conversation changes shape depending on who is in the room. CIOs and CTOs lead with vendor consolidation and total cost of delivery. Chief Data, AI, and Digital Officers press on provable reliability, since they are the ones defending model behavior to a board. Quality engineering and operations leaders want validation and governance built into the work from day one rather than added at the end.

"The vocabulary changes, but the underlying question is always the same," Cantrell said. "Prove this works before I bet the business on it."

Answering it often begins earlier than clients expect. "Many times clients do not understand what outcome they want," Cantrell said. "We ask the tough questions up front — what the problems are, where the gaps are, where they are losing in the market — and use that to shape a roadmap toward where the client wants to be in the next five years."

"Instead of bolting AI onto existing processes, we deconstruct the business process and re-imagine it through the lens of AI," he said. "If you start with technology, you can end up with a roadmap of interesting capabilities and no clear way to know whether they moved the business. When you start with the outcome and work backward, you can determine what to build first, how to measure it, and what 'done' means. That is what makes an AI roadmap actionable and fundable."

Cantrell was drawn to KMS by the opportunity to work with engineering teams across the company's operations in the United States, Vietnam, Mexico, and Poland, on work extending beyond platform implementation and spanning nearly every industry vertical.

"I wanted to work with exceptional teams on some of the toughest problems in business," Cantrell said. "KMS brings together deeply talented engineers who are passionate about solving problems, not simply implementing technology. That combination gives us the opportunity to help clients move beyond using AI and begin operating as AI-native enterprises."

Working with clients and delivery teams globally, Cantrell defines success as Enterprise Execution being recognized as a discipline in its own right rather than a synonym for AI advisory, with KMS's playbooks applied consistently across the company's teams worldwide.

"First we AI ourselves, then we AI the world," Cantrell said.

About KMS Technology

We are a global, AI-native technology services company focused on Enterprise Execution. We help enterprises build and modernize applications, create trusted data foundations, put AI into production, and continuously run and improve the systems that execute the work. Founded in 2009 in the U.S., KMS has grown to serve clients worldwide, with locations across the U.S., Vietnam, Poland, and Mexico. We are trusted by technology and business leaders for the quality of our engineering, delivery, and execution. Our mission is to help enterprises move from business intent to measurable outcomes faster — with the control, reliability, governance, and confidence required to scale. At KMS, we believe sustainable growth is built on the success of our clients and employees and on making a lasting contribution to our communities.

Stay connected: kms-technology.com

KMS Technology Introduces Troy Cantrell as Field CTO to Advance Enterprise Execution