Pope Leo Draws Rock-Star Crowds in Secular France While Decrying Assisted Dying as 'False Compassion'
Pope Leo was greeted with an unusually fervent public reception in France, a country long defined by its secular political culture, as he used the visit to sharpen the Vatican’s moral line against legalized assisted dying. Speaking from a hospital and pilgrimage setting in Lourdes, he framed medically assisted suicide as a distortion of compassion and warned that medicine must never become an instrument of “programmed death.”
