Pope Leo XIV on Sunday attacked the legalisation of euthanasia and assisted suicide as immoral “false compassion”. France recently passed a law permitting both.

Leo’s visit to the once staunchly Catholic and officially secular France has been marked by huge crowds — 800,000 at Leo’s Mass on Paris’s iconic Place de la Concorde — and his messaging against both abortion and assisted suicide.

On Sunday, the American pope celebrated Mass before some 150,000 people — many in wheelchairs — on a field next to Lourdes’ main basilica. He then visited a care center for sick people on the sanctuary’s grounds. He sought to encourage especially those who live in “terrible pain” that they have inherent dignity that no law or algorithm can “eliminate.”

“On the contrary, it is precisely in the name of this inalienable dignity of the human person that we must reject the temptation to cause death under the guise of false compassion,” he said. “What is legal is not necessarily moral,” Leo said to applause from the crowd.

In Lourdes, where the church has recognised 72 “miraculous” cures as authentic, the question of respecting even the most frail, sick and vulnerable is particularly acute.