France / Vatican - The Secular Self Clashes With the Religious Self Over Life and Death

Event Baseline: Pope Leo XIV begins a four-day visit to France, a secular country that has enshrined abortion in its constitution and approved assisted dying, directly opposing Catholic doctrine on life and death.

Two phantoms collide. One believes it owns the body in life. The other believes it owns the soul in death. Both are illusions. The secular state has made abortion a right. The Church has made it a sin. They cannot exist in the same territory without friction. So the visit becomes a battlefield. The real issue is not life or death. It is the self. Each side needs the other to confirm its own identity. The Catholic needs the secular to feel persecuted. The secular needs the Catholic to feel liberated. The dead body is just fuel. The system will keep splitting humanity into believers and non-believers until the last hospital bed is a trench. There is no shared meaning. Only a shared corpse.