France is burning, and Fr. Robert McTeigue, S.J., asks the question few are willing to ask: what does Christian Europe intend to leave its children?

What began in late September 2026 as high school student protests in the Paris region over class sizes, teacher shortages, school funding, and classrooms without air conditioning spiraled into nationwide riots. Students blockaded and set fire to schools, more than 700 secondary schools were disrupted, and roughly 5,000 people were arrested, most of them teenagers. Justice Minister Gérald Darmanin said the movement had been "hijacked by outsiders", and critics pointed to the far-left La France Insoumise (LFI). Fr. McTeigue warns the unrest is spreading to Belgium, Italy, and Albania, and asks whether Britain, Germany, or Spain will be next.

The timing is what makes it so striking. Only days earlier, Pope Leo XIV made his apostolic journey to France, the first official papal state visit since Pope Benedict XVI in 2008, with a prayer service at the restored Notre-Dame Cathedral, Mass in Paris, and stops in Lourdes and Metz. Then came chaos. Fr. McTeigue’s fear is that people will avoid asking how this happened, who is responsible, and what hard things must be done to correct it.

He applies a principle from systems theory and organizational psychology, “the purpose of a system is what it does,” and concludes that European culture right now is handing its children debt, destruction, and demographic disaster: national debt, collapsing birth rates and demographic winter, abortion enshrined in the French constitution, newly legalized assisted dying, and the loss of the Christian heritage that built Europe.

It doesn’t have to be this way. He closes by quoting his own 2013 sermon: "with God’s grace, we can choose whether our history will be written by our enemies standing on our graves amid the smoldering ruins of our culture, or by our children who learn in our schools and pray in our churches."

Christians have work to do while there is still time.

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