Speaking privately to France’s Catholic bishops at the Shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes on Sunday, Pope Leo XIV urged “the greatest vigilance” against clergy sexual abuse — then sat down with seven French survivors who described the encounter as “extraordinary.”
Pope Leo XIV has pressed France’s senior Catholic leaders to finish the work of rooting out the “scourge” of sexual abuse, during a closed‑door meeting with bishops at the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes in southern France on the third day of his four‑day state visit.
“You have faced with determination the painful scourge of abuse of minors committed by members of the clergy or within an ecclesial context,” the Pope told the bishops, according to remarks released to reporters. “It is important to persevere along the path you have begun, maintaining the greatest vigilance.”
Hours later, Leo met seven survivors of clergy abuse in France — four men and three women. The Vatican said he “thanked them for their painful testimony and reaffirmed his commitment to ensuring that the harm they experienced is not repeated for others.” Jean‑Marie Delbos, one of the survivors, told a news conference the Pope had listened and was briefed on their individual cases. “I never thought I would have a Pope before me,” he said.
Before the bishop meeting, the Pope celebrated Mass for hundreds of thousands of pilgrims at Lourdes, the grotto shrine associated with reported miraculous cures — and, increasingly, with healing for abuse survivors. Reporters covering the trip say he also carried a message on protecting life, opposing euthanasia and medically assisted dying, a live policy debate in France.
The Lourdes leg followed a sprawling open‑air Mass at the Place de la Concorde in Paris on Saturday, which the Vatican estimated at 700,000 people, with some organisers’ figures nearer 800,000, and a pope mobile procession down the Champs‑Élysées. Leo told worshippers not to keep their faith to themselves but to “let it overflow so that those you meet may be refreshed,” and told young people they are “today’s Church.” He met President Emmanuel Macron on Friday.
The visit lands against a stark backdrop: a 2021 independent commission found roughly 330,000 children were abused by clergy or Church‑affiliated laypeople in France over 70 years. Regular churchgoing has collapsed from about 35% of the population in 1960 to under 5% today, and the priesthood has shrunk from 25,000 in 1990 to fewer than 9,000. Yet, adult baptisms more than doubled in five years, reaching about 10,000 in 2025 — a sign of a complicated, reviving religious curiosity.
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