Muslim group fears ‘France will become Catholic again’

PARIS (LifeSiteNews) — A French Muslim apologetics group that actively opposes a Catholic revival has predicted that France could “become Catholic again” within a few generations, following the Pope’s enthusiastic reception in Paris.

On September 25 the group Miséricorde pour l’Houmanité (“Mercy for Humanity”) published a message on X predicting that “France will become Catholic again” amid what it described as a growing Catholic revival, strengthened by American Catholic influence. The group lamented that such a revival could undermine Islam’s spiritual influence in Western Europe.

Je suis triste quand je vois toute cette effervescence autour du catholicisme, je prédisais cela depuis des années et j’ai l’impression d’être un agent de la CIA qui assisterait impuissant au retour de l’Union Soviétique.
Dans 45 ans la France redeviendra catholique et nous…

— Miséricorde pour l’Humanité France (@MisericordeF) September 25, 2026

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“I am sad when I see all this excitement around Catholicism,” the group wrote. “I have been predicting this for years.… In 45 years, France will become Catholic again and we will be left with nothing but our tears.”

“I am a good player, nevertheless the Catholics are much better organized as well as more determined than us Muslims and even than the Zionists,” the post continued. “We must know how to recognize the strength of the Catholic international. American Catholics will now flood the world with their soft power at the expense of both Muslim spiritual hegemony in Western Europe and the Zionist lobby.”

Miséricorde pour l’Humanité France has pledged to “fight” what it sees as a Catholic “resurgence.” In another post on X the following day, the group wrote: “Let them [Catholics] know that I have enormous esteem for them as theological opponents, but I will fight to the end, God willing, with cordiality and in compliance with [civil] law, on the intellectual and financial battlefield in order to contain the resurgence of the Catholic religion, just as Ronald Reagan contained the rise of communism.”

“Catholics are our best theological opponents,” a Muslim apologist at the group claimed in a further post published on X. The Islamic scholar said that the “biggest reason” preventing him from embracing Catholicism, despite his “ongoing fascination with the subject,” is a “contradiction between Dignitatis Humanae of Vatican II and the pre-Vatican II magisterium” on religious liberty. According to him, this is the clearest proof that Jesus’ promise of the Church’s indefectibility in Matthew 16:18 “cannot be true,” pointing to what he described as an apparent rupture between the two magisteria.

In a March 3 video titled The war against Iran will accelerate the downfall of the Zionist lobby and the return of Catholicism, the same Muslim apologetics group argued that the war against Iran would mark the “desperate last act” of a declining “Zionist lobby” in the United States, accelerating its loss of support among younger Republicans and clearing the way for a rising “non-interventionist Catholic lobby.”

They also claimed that American Catholic elites – described as “particularly brilliant” – have been drawing away from Zionist influence, a trend they say is reinforced by conversions of influential Protestant figures to Catholicism that often bring with them a rejection of dispensationalist theology.

The Muslim speaker also argued that a growing “Catholic revival” is being driven not by the masses but by committed elites and a new generation of conservative clergy. He claimed that progressive “boomer” priests have virtually disappeared in the United States, while arguing that traditionalist priests account for roughly a quarter of new ordinations in France, giving them outsized influence within Catholic leadership.

He also linked the collapse of religious practice to the weakening of traditional preaching on sin and judgment, and pointed to rising adult baptisms and the growing reach of Catholic media figures as signs of a broader Catholic resurgence.

The Muslim apologist explicitly framed France as the future “laboratory of the re-Christianisation of the West,” backed by wealthy, “France-loving” American Catholic elites who are not “pro-Islam” and regard Western Muslims primarily as “theological adversaries” to be evangelized. He specifically pointed to Mission Ismérie, an organization that reportedly allocated €1 million ($1.14 million) to evangelize Muslims in France.

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Despite the concerns voiced by this French Muslim apologetics group, France’s principal Muslim institutions, including the French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM) and the Union of Islamic Organizations of France (UOIF), have so far remained silent, with no official public reactions to the papal visit.

Pope Leo XIV’s four-day apostolic visit to France, from September 25 to September 28, attracted more than 1 million participants, making it one of the largest papal events in the country in recent decades. An estimated 800,000 faithful attended the Pope’s outdoor Mass at Paris’ Place de la Concorde, while more than 150,000 pilgrims gathered for his Mass in Lourdes. Additional crowds lined the Pope’s route through Paris and attended youth events during the trip, bringing overall turnout to roughly 1 to 1.2 million people across France.