Pope Leo XIV meets French abuse survivors in Lourdes, urges Church to face its past

Pope Leo XIV told seven survivors of clerical child abuse that he was committed to ending the harm inflicted by Catholic priests, during an emotional private meeting at the sanctuary of Lourdes in southwestern France, the Vatican said on Sunday.

The 80-year-old pontiff, who leads a Church of roughly 1.4 billion Catholics, listened to the group — all of whom were abused as children and are now adults — for nearly two hours. The survivors described the encounter as moving and said they were struck by Leo's compassion and by how well he appeared to know the details of each of their cases.

The meeting took place during a four-day apostolic journey to France, the first such trip of his pontificate, and comes at a moment of intense scrutiny for the Roman Catholic Church in a country where the scars of decades of institutional abuse remain raw.

Jean-Marie Delbos, one of the survivors, recounted the moment Leo first saw him. "When he saw the state I was in, he took me into his arms," the 80-year-old said, calling it "an extraordinary moment." Delbos was abused as a pupil at the boarding school of Notre-Dame de Betharram, near Lourdes, where staff have been accused of physical and sexual abuse across several decades.

Other members of the group photographed at the subsequent press conference included Veronique Garnier, Olivier Mardi, Jerome Guillement and Bertrand Virieux. Their decision to speak publicly after the private audience underlined their determination to be seen and heard, not pitied.

Yet the survivors were careful to separate gratitude from satisfaction. Jerome Guilement, who has written publicly about a priest abusing him as a teenager, said Leo grasped the "systemic" character of sexual abuse within the Church. In his view, individual perpetrators commit the crimes, but it is the institutional framework that allows them to continue.

"He certainly believes that the Church has done a great deal in France, but he also believes that the Church in France still has a tremendous amount left to do," Guillement said, adding that the pope understands the distinction between individual wrongdoing and structural complicity.

That distinction is at the heart of the debate over accountability in France. A 2021 independent inquiry estimated that some 330,000 French children had been abused by Catholic clergy and lay leaders over seven decades — a figure that shocked the country and left the Church facing sustained criticism over what it knew, when it knew it, and why it failed to act.

Local leaders in Lourdes expressed hope that the papal visit would help repair the Church's damaged standing at home, where institutional trust has fallen sharply and where victims have long campaigned for recognition, transparency and removal of those responsible.

Earlier the same day, Leo addressed an estimated 150,000 people at an open-air Mass in a field near the famous Marian shrine. In that homily, he said the Church must have the courage to face its past — language welcomed by many as a long-overdue acknowledgment, but criticized by some as too general.

Veronique Garnier said she found the Mass troubling, noting that Leo referred to the abuse scandal without offering a direct apology, and that she wondered why she had bothered to attend. She said, however, that the private meeting afterwards gave her reason for cautious optimism.

"I do indeed believe there is hope — hope that there can be change and truly listening to us at a deep level, rather than just superficially with beautiful words that are never followed by any real action," Garnier said.

Her comments capture the central tension of the visit: the gap between reassurance and reform. For survivors, a pontiff's compassion and words carry limited weight unless they translate into compensation, transparency, canonical consequences for abusers, and lasting changes to how the Church investigates and conceals abuse.

The meeting also highlighted the specificity of the French case. Notre-Dame de Betharram, where Delbos was educated, is one of a number of Catholic institutions in the country placed under formal examination over alleged cover-ups, and several former staff have faced prosecution.

The encounter in Lourdes was not Leo's only intervention on the issue during the day. According to a text provided by the Vatican, the pope also addressed the abuse scandals during a closed-door meeting with French bishops, an agenda point that remains a persistent source of tension between the Holy See and the French episcopal conference over the pace of reform.

Timing may have shaped the occasion. Leo's France visit has also placed him at the centre of unrelated domestic debates, including France's recently approved landmark assisted-dying legislation, and has drawn large crowds for public events in Paris, including an open-air Mass reported to have attracted hundreds of thousands.

On Sunday night, Leo joined a candlelight procession at the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes, a scene that underscored the contrast between the warmth of the pilgrim imagery and the severity of the abuse discussions that preceded it.

The pope was expected to travel to the northeastern city of Metz on Monday before returning to Rome the same day, bringing to a close a visit that has placed the Church's reckoning with sexual abuse at the centre of its agenda — and left survivors asking whether reassurance will finally be followed by action.