Will the Pope’s just-concluded visit to France, and the hundreds of thousands of Catholics who flooded streets and stadiums to greet him, end up changing France, the United States, and the entire West? Sounds fanciful, but there’s precedent.

In June 1979, millions filled the streets of Poland when Pope John Paul II visited his homeland. Within a decade, the impossible happened: Communism was defeated not just in Poland but the rest of Eastern Europe, which became free.

To many, it wasn’t a coincidence. To be sure, a confluence of great leadership in the 1980s began tearing at the Iron Curtain: Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Vaclav Havel, and Poland’s own Lech Walesa.

But John Paul II’s vision and clarity stand out. And the trip to Poland, which came just months into his 27-year papacy, made people take the measure of the Pole who had just ascended to the Throne of St. Peter.

In his homeland, John Paul II carried an important message to a population that had been beleaguered by decades of communism: Do not be afraid. While the preponderance of his message was based on Scripture, the context for those words was historical and political.

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On June 8, on his seventh day preaching in Poland, John Paul II tied Catholicism to Poland’s national identity in a pivotal speech to university students in the city of Krakow:

You must carry into the future the whole experience of history that is called “Poland.” It is a difficult experience, perhaps one of the most difficult in the world, in Europe, and in the Church. Do not be afraid of the toil; be afraid only of thoughtlessness and pusillanimity. From the difficult experience that we call “Poland” a better future can be drawn, but only on condition that you are honorable, temperate, believing, free in spirit, and strong in your convictions.

When Poles saw each other in the streets, in the squares, in the basilicas, they knew they had the numbers. It was then that they started losing their fear.

Walesa, the trade union leader who became president when Poland regained its sovereignty and freedom, said last year that John Paul II “allowed us to notice how many of us there are. … We stopped being afraid.”

That is one aspect that invites comparisons to Leo’s trip to the country the French like to call l’Hexagone (for its geometrical shape). The other is that, like Poland in 1979, France, Europe, and the entire West are besieged by forces as anti-Christian as communism. Let’s first discuss the crowds.

They were enormous. In Paris alone, the pope drew 800,000 people for an open-air Mass in the iconic Champs-Elysees last Saturday, a crowd 30% larger than those who had registered.

During his homily in the heart of Paris, the American pope urged the throng to go out and evangelize. “From this beautiful city of Paris, I pray fervently that the living water of the Holy Spirit may flow throughout France,” he said, speaking in French.

On Sunday, 80,000 French people, mostly young adults, packed into Paris’s historic Stade de France, where France’s national soccer team plays. Tickets were sold out immediately, according to organizers.

The crowds, and the fervor we all saw on television and social media, are what make many of us think that the experience will have the same effect as in Poland. They will lose their fears and realize that, like in Poland, French national identity is indivisible from Christianity.

That contradicts everything we are told about the forces now besieging France. One is secularist, in French laicite, which traces its origin to the blood-drenched anti-Catholic massacres of the French Revolution. Paradoxically, the other force is the strong pull of Islamification. The reaction to the pope seemed to put the lie to all that.

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“For centuries, tyrants like Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin, or the followers of Mohammed have claimed to have put the Church to death. But She has always arisen,” Father Benedict Kiely, an English priest known for defending persecuted Christians, wrote in the Catholic Thing.

Yes, France may have become deeply secularized, Kiely added, “Yet a million people lined the Champs Élysées in Paris to see the pope. Thousands of young people enthusiastically greeted him. And as we know, France is the very epicenter of what is called the ‘quiet revival’ of Catholicism, though, in France last week it was rather loud.”

There were 186,000 baptisms in France in 2024, less than 40% of the baptisms in 1980, according to the Associated Press. But several trends point to a revival. For example, adult baptisms—a sign of personal commitment—have tripled in the past decade to 13,000 this year.

Kate Pesey, an American who leads the Tocqueville Fellowship Program in Paris and a good friend, told me that the annual Paris-Chartres pilgrimage last year drew record numbers. “It’s not a one-time thing,” she said of Leo’s reception. “Among the young, it’s becoming the cool thing to have faith.”

Whether Leo XIV’s pilgrimage will have the same effect as John Paul II’s we still don’t know. But we can always pray for it.