Sukkot: France Under the Fragile Tent

For years, the Holy See seemed to have set France quietly aside, a file forever deferred. La Pope Francis went to Marseille, to Corsica, to Strasbourg – never to the center, never to Paris. Some read disinterest into that geographical choice; others saw the prudence of a pope formed on the peripheries of South America, approaching France through its borders and particular communities – Mother Mare Nostrum – rather than through the capital’s account of the nation.

Pope Leo XIV changes that geography on a date that acquires a particular resonance when seen from Jerusalem: he sets foot in France on 25 September 2026, the eve of Sukkot 5787. The Feast of Booths begins that evening and accompanies his entire stay, reaching Chol Hamoed – חול המועד, the intermediate days – by his departure on the 28th. This American pope, both North and South at once – missionary in Peru, Augustinian, the first pontiff born in the United States – enters French territory as Jews in Israel and throughout the world begin leaving their solid houses for temporary dwellings beneath branches. The coincidence establishes no Catholic liturgical connection. But seen from Jerusalem, it opens another perspective on the visit.

Sukkot gives bodily form to the living, face-to-face bond. One leaves the solid house for a hut whose covering should ideally allow the stars to show through: a voluntary loosening of the illusion of self-sufficiency. The gesture speaks to societies increasingly accustomed to mediated encounters and to a French Church learning to inhabit a minority position. The French sociologist Yann Raison du Cleuziou has drawn attention to its changing generations and forms of belonging. The question concerns how people remain present to one another when inherited structures no longer gather them as they once did.

The sukkah offers a spiritual foundation that does not promise immunity from suffering, but releases security from the illusion of self-sufficiency. Its fragility is inhabited, shared, and celebrated.

The festival also concerns identity: unity need not require the erasure of difference. The four species – the upright palm, the fragrant myrtle, the willow with neither taste nor scent, and the etrog possessing both – remain distinct while being brought together in one ritual gesture. Their differences belong to the act itself.

That image offers a way of considering the visit to Metz, a border city in a Europe repeatedly torn apart and reassembled. It also brings into view Leo XIV’s apostolic letter In Unitate Fidei, published in November 2025 for the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea. Written as he prepared to travel to Turkey, the letter provides a theological background against which this French journey can also be read.

Nicaea gave decisive expression to the confession that the Son is homoousios – ὁμοούσιος, consubstantial – with the Father. The word became a doctrinal foundation shared across Christian traditions whose languages, liturgies, and histories remained distinct. The comparison with the four species has its limits, but it raises a pertinent question for French Catholicism: how can believers of different social origins, inherited practices, and degrees of attachment to tradition belong to the same body and be joined without demanding that everyone resemble one another?

Then come the Ushpizin/אושפיזין, the seven ancestral guests welcomed into the sukkah, with a different figure leading each evening. Their presence carries an obligation towards the guests who need an actual seat and an actual meal. Religious joy becomes questionable when the poor, the stranger, and the marginal remain outside: a community’s spiritual health is measured by whom it receives at its table.

The sukkah (booth) is a dwelling one enters freely; its lesson also concerns responsibility towards those who have no secure home to return to.

Lourdes brings that question into the papal itinerary. Alongside its association with healing and miracles, it is a place where the sick become visible and where dependence on another person is part of ordinary daily life. Leo XIV’s private meeting there with survivors of abuse gives listening a particularly demanding meaning. Hospitality must include hearing what an institution would rather not hear.

The Beatitudes call the poor in spirit blessed. Such poverty cannot be imposed on those already wounded, nor used to excuse their abandonment. Cardinal Bustillo of Ajaccio, a Franciscan who served as guardian of the Saint-Maximilien Kolbe convent in Lourdes before becoming a bishop, knows the place through its daily responsibilities as well as its ceremonies.

A deeper question runs through this movement from shelter to encounter: whom do Christians receive in the Eucharist? At Caesarea Philippi, Peter confesses, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matthew 16:16). The passage holds a central place in Catholic teaching on Petrine primacy, the authority Leo XIV exercises as Bishop of Rome. Yet the confession itself belongs to the shared Christian inheritance, and In Unitate Fidei explicitly connects it with the question addressed at Nicaea.

The title “Only Begotten,” monogenēs (μονογενής), brings another scriptural thread into this confession. John’s Gospel and the Nicene Creed give it its Christian theological expression; Hebrews 11:17 also applies the word to Isaac, recalling the beloved, unique son of the Akedah (the binding of the son on the wood by his father Abraham). These uses open a field of resonance without making Isaac’s sonship and the Christian confession of the eternal Son interchangeable. The presence of the One only-Begotten Son is at the core of pope Leo XIV’s expression of the faith

The letter speaks of the Son eternally begotten of the Father, incarnate within human history, and received by Christians in the Eucharist. It also recalls John’s “dwelt among us”-ἐσκήνωσεν, “pitched his tent among us” – bringing the image of the tent into the Christian confession of the Incarnation and, through it, into the Eucharistic encounter, while leaving Sukkot its own enduring meaning.

The confession concerns the Son who has truly risen from the dead according to the Christian faith. Thus, another liturgical resonance becomes audible: the second blessing of the Amidah, mechayeh hametim—מחיה המתים, “who gives life to the dead.” Jewish and Christian prayer stand on distinct theological ground, yet both proclaim that death does not exhaust what God can bring about.

There is a third calendar folded into these days. For the Orthodox Church of Jerusalem and other churches following the old calendar, the Exaltation of the Holy Cross falls this year on Sunday, 27 September in the civil calendar: the second day of Sukkot, when Leo XIV will be in Lourdes. The Cross’s feast returns on its fixed ecclesiastical date; its meeting with Sukkot follows the changing relationship between the calendars. This year, the feast enters the days of the tent.

Ezekiel’s vision offers another image: the mark placed on the foreheads of those who grieve over the abominations committed in Jerusalem (Ezekiel 9:4). The ancient cross-shaped tav/תו later invited Christian readings of this sign as a figure of the Cross. That interpretation belongs to the Christian reception of the passage; the prophet’s vision retains its own setting and urgency.

Christian tradition likewise contemplates Isaac carrying the wood and being bound upon it at Moriah as a figure through which to approach the Passion. The Akedah – עקדה – also remains a living Jewish text, recited in many traditional morning prayer rites. Its presence in Christian interpretation does not remove it from the people who continue to pray it.

Orthodoxy celebrates the exalted Cross together with the Resurrection. The feast’s own worship joins veneration of the Cross to glorification of the risen Lord. The wood and the torture are faced directly, within a confession that they do not have the final word.

Three liturgical grammars thus come into proximity across the same handful of days. They retain their differences, their particular memories, and their ways of naming hope.

There is, finally, the figure of Louis IX, and he cannot be invoked innocently from Jerusalem. Under his reign, the Paris Disputation of 1240 was followed by the public burning of the Talmud. His place in French Catholic memory cannot erase that destruction.

The king’s crusading tent outside Tunis and the sukkah belong to very different histories. Their resemblance as temporary shelters makes their difference more troubling: human fragility does not, by itself, teach hospitality. A person can experience dependence, pray sincerely, and still participate in the persecution of others.

Remembering this history gives the language of hospitality a concrete obligation. A Church speaking of its roots must also listen to the living communities whose books and voices Christian power once sought to silence. The meeting begins with that willingness to hear.

These September days bring distinct traditions into proximity, each carrying its own prayers, wounds, and expectations. Seen from Jerusalem in these days of profound international turbulence, their overlap invites a question that will remain after the papal visit: how can inherited faith make room for another person without requiring that person to disappear?

The tent will come down. The person received beneath it will still be our neighbor.