Paris • Pope Leo XIV, the first pope from the United States and the leader of more than 1.4 billion ideologically and ethnically diverse Roman Catholics, will not be pinned down.

On Friday, Leo arrived in France for the fourth major international voyage of his still young papacy, touring one of the church’s original cradles just three months after leaving Spain, another citadel of European Catholicism.

Those sojourns to wealthy Western countries are bookended by an April trip to Africa, the continent where Catholicism is growing most rapidly, and a coming tour of Latin America, where Catholicism is often associated with social justice movements.

A clear message is emerging from Leo’s varied travel schedule, experts say. He wants to be a pope for everyone — the newly faithful and fervent as well as those from Catholicism’s traditional but increasingly secular heartlands. France, a country that previous popes have referred to by an old sobriquet, “the eldest daughter of the church,” would fall squarely into the latter category.

From his election as pope in May 2025, Leo has sought to portray himself as transcending any particular camp. Although he has clashed with President Donald Trump over the Iran war and migration, he has won over conservatives with his conciliatory style and by being more receptive to traditions such as the Latin Mass, a liturgy replaced in the 1960s.

By visiting France as well as Algeria, and Spain as well as Peru, Leo is setting himself apart from his predecessor, Pope Francis, who shared many of Leo’s social leanings but had a less unifying style.

“It’s a corrective in the sense that Francis was viewed too much as having been a Global South pope,” said José Casanova, a senior fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs at Georgetown University.

Francis, who was from Argentina, never made a papal visit to Spain or an official state visit to France, where his trips were either for conferences or to speak at the European Parliament in Strasbourg.

Francis focused on what he called “the peripheries” of the church, but John McGreevy, a historian at the University of Notre Dame, said Leo was “more concerned about unity of the church, about pulling Catholics from all various backgrounds together.”

“So he’s not going to ignore historically Catholic countries like France,” McGreevy added.

The visit also highlights Leo’s support for multilateral cooperation, exemplified by the European Union, at a time when it is under fierce attack from right-leaning politicians in Europe and the United States.

The pope visited the headquarters of UNESCO, the United Nations cultural agency from which Trump has twice withdrawn the U.S. There, Leo made a speech about the importance of international cooperation and also restated his vision for protecting human agency in the age of artificial intelligence.

On the flight to France, Leo also briefly spoke on the subject, saying in response to a question from The New York Times that “many” AI leaders were very much open to looking for ways of making sure that AI does not displace or ultimately destroy humanity. He added: “Good things are beginning at least.”

After a day in Lourdes, a revered site of spiritual pilgrimage for Catholics, Leo will visit the northern city of Metz on Monday, the final day of his France trip. He will address a religious gathering at the Robert Schuman Center, a convention hall named after a French statesman who led efforts to improve cooperation between European nations after World War II.

“There is a very strong message sent by Leo in going to Metz and celebrating the figure of Robert Schuman, who is one of the founding fathers of political Europe,” said Charles Mercier, an expert on Catholicism at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris.

That may again provide a contrast with Francis, who, when he spoke to the European Parliament in 2014, asserted that Europe was no longer “vibrant.”

Leo started his four-day trip in Paris, the capital of a country that has evolved since the French Revolution into a resolutely secular society with a strict separation between church and state. Fewer than half of the nation’s nearly 70 million people identify themselves as Catholic, and only 5% say they go to church regularly.

Against that backdrop, Leo stressed the importance of religion in a speech in Paris on Friday, saying that it was important that secular France “does not exclude religion but is capable of valuing it as an educational resource.”

He also took implicit aim at a bill approved recently by French lawmakers to legalize medically assisted dying for the terminally ill. Speaking alongside President Emmanuel Macron of France, he warned against using science or technology to promote “the possibility of arranging one’s own death.”

However deeply rooted France’s secular tradition, people from across French society rallied around one of the country’s most revered Catholic sites, Notre-Dame Cathedral, during the site’s renovation after a devastating fire in 2019. On Friday, Leo will become the first pontiff to visit since the cathedral reopened in 2024.

France often appears to be a land of churches empty but for a few aging worshippers. Like neighbors Italy and Germany, however, its Catholic population is increasingly bolstered by immigrants from North Africa or Southeast Asia.

There has been an almost threefold rise in baptisms among adults in France, to nearly 10,400 in 2024, from roughly 3,600 in 2021, according to figures from the Conference of Bishops of France. Experts attribute that expansion to a variety of factors, including the desire for spiritual meaning spurred by the dislocation of the pandemic and the galvanizing role of social media. They say the rise may also be because of a decline in baptisms at birth, leaving adults to seek the sacrament later in life.

“We have gone from being Catholic out of heritage and habit,” said Jérôme Fourquet, a political scientist who has studied French attitudes toward the church. “Today, it is a Catholicism that is very clearly in the minority, but a Catholicism driven by choice and affirmation.”

Leo was expected to appeal to that energized group of mostly younger Catholics at a prayer vigil on Friday in the Stade de France, a cavernous arena outside Paris where France won the soccer World Cup in 1998. On Saturday, he will meet newly baptized adults, and those preparing for the sacrament, at the Catholic Institute of Paris.

Among those recently baptized is Malick-Emmanuel Seck, a 32-year-old lawyer who grew up in Senegal, in a Muslim family, before emigrating to Paris at 15. Educated in Catholic schools in Africa, Seck said he found France to be an irreligious society when he first arrived.

When Seck took part in a friend’s wedding Mass, he said he had been moved by the beauty of the liturgy. After a two-year course in the faith, he was baptized last year.

Now a member of the Church of the Holy Trinity, a vibrant parish in the Pigalle district of Paris, Seck said he had “clearly discovered a whole world.”

Paul Balaresque, a 29-year-old priest, said his church in western Paris was helping parishioners identify places where they could see the pope in the streets or attend the Mass and prayer vigil. Leo’s visit is a source of “great joy,” he said, adding, “I am surprised, in a highly de-Christianized country, to see the extent to which people who are far removed from the church are interested in his message.”

Leo will also appeal more broadly to Catholics who rarely, if ever, enter a church. He will preside over a Mass in the Place de la Concorde, the symbolic center of the French Republic, where police said they expected a crowd of 600,000.

The square’s name aligns with Leo’s message of harmony between people, though it is also famous as the place where King Louis XVI was guillotined during the revolution.

Note to readers • This article originally appeared in The New York Times.