Pope Leo urges healing of ‘deep wounds’ before meeting child sexual abuse survivors in France | Pope Leo XIV

The pope has called on the Catholic church to heal “deep wounds” and “painful errors”, before a meeting survivors of child sexual abuse as he continues his four-day visit to France.

Addressing a crowd in a large field near the Catholic shrine of Lourdes on Sunday, Pope Leo XIV called on the church to reckon with its past, without directly referencing sexual abuse scandals in France that affected at least 330,000 children over seven decades.

“In order to heal the deep wounds, infidelities and ⁠painful errors that have occurred within [the church], we must humbly place ourselves under the Lord’s purifying gaze,” the first US pope told the estimated crowd of 150,000 people.

Leo met seven survivors of child sexual abuse by French clergy privately on Sunday after leading an open-air morning mass at Lourdes, one of the most popular Catholic sites for pilgrims and reputed as a place of healing.

The survivors said the pope had listened to them, was informed of their cases and said more work was needed to respond to the scandal.

Five of the seven held a press conference in Lourdes

. Jean-Marie Delbos said he never thought the day would come when he would meet a pope. He asked Leo to bless a photo of his grandmother, which he did. “It was extraordinary,” he said.

During a homily to the faithful, the pope also attacked medically assisted dying as immoral “false compassion” in a staunch articulation of the Catholic church’s teaching that all human life must be defended from conception until natural death.

After years of debate, France formally adopted legislation last month allowing incurably ill adults the right to “aid in dying”, joining a small number of countries with similar laws, including Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Canada.

The pope said: “It is impossible to regard causing death as something normal. What is legal is not necessarily moral.”

The pope was due to take part in six events while in Lourdes, including a meeting with staff and patients at the shrine’s care centre.

Lourdes has drawn millions of sick and disabled believers seeking a cure from its spring waters since the Catholic church officially recognised visions of the Virgin Mary reported by a local girl in 1858. Arriving there in a white popemobile on Saturday night, however, Leo would have been reminded of the church’s dark and painful legacy, as he passed boarded-up mosaics by a Jesuit priest who is accused of abusing women over three decades.

Marko Rupnik, one of the Catholic church’s best-known mosaic artists, is on trial in a Vatican court, accused by more than two dozen women of having psychologically, spiritually and sexually abused them from the 1990s, including during the creation of his artworks. The bishop of Lourdes ordered the works covered up, reasoning that survivors of abuse seeking succour at the site should not be forced to see them.

Rupnik is not known to have commented publicly on the allegations, Reuters reported.

Among the survivors who met the pope was a former pupil of the nearby Catholic boarding school Notre-Dame de Bétharram. Former students have recounted their experiences of violence, rape and sexual assault in what is thought to be the biggest child sexual abuse scandal at a school in French history.

In an interview published last year, the pope spoke of a crisis of clerical sexual abuse in the church. He also said “victims must be treated with great respect and with an understanding that those who have suffered very deep wounds because of abuse, sometimes carry those wounds for their entire life”, according to a transcript on Vatican News, the Holy See’s official news site.

The first official papal visit to France in 18 years follows an announcement last week by the country’s Independent National Authority for Recognition and Reparation that about 2,000 people who reported sexual abuse by clergy or other church representatives were seeking reparations.

France’s Catholic bishops conference agreed to provide compensation after a landmark report in 2021 estimated that 330,000 children were sexually abused over seven decades by predatory priests or other Catholic figures. The two-and-a-half-year independent inquiry found that vast numbers of children were subjected to sexual violence by priests and clergy and that the crimes were covered up in a “systemic way” by a deliberate “veil of silence” in the church.

On the day Leo arrived in Paris, a group of survivors published an open letter voicing fears that his visit would change nothing, criticising that the seven he was due to meet in Lourdes were “carefully selected” by the church, rather than survivors’ groups.

“You will merely ask us for forgiveness. This is not enough. One does not ask for forgiveness for a crime; one is responsible for a crime,” they wrote in the letter published in the newspaper Libération.

The pope arrived to celebrate mass on Sunday morning to a rapturous reception from the faithful, who waved flags and cheered, as they thronged the streets of Lourdes to catch a glimpse of him. The Holy See’s live stream showed Leo making stately progress in his popemobile, stopping frequently to greet and bless babies that were passed to him.

The south-western town near the Spanish border is one of the most important Catholic sites in the world, attracting 3 million pilgrims a year. The Associated Press reported that the pope’s visit had caused accommodation prices to soar, with the price of some one-night hotel stays reaching more than €2,000 (£1,700).