Pope Leo XIV Presses French Church to Face Abuse in Lourdes

Pope Leo XIV on Sunday, 27 September 2026, called on the Catholic Church in France to confront sexual abuse by clergy, telling an estimated 150,000 people in a large field near the shrine of Lourdes that healing requires admitting institutional failure. He is due to meet privately later on Sunday with seven survivors of abuse by French clergy.

"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," he said during the open-air morning Mass. The Vatican published the text as a homily, a sermon preached during Mass, delivered at the Prairie of the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes on 27 September 2026 Vatican.

Lourdes draws millions of pilgrims each year. The Mass was the main public event of the Lourdes leg of the trip. Leo arrived at the shrine in a white popemobile on Saturday night, according to The Guardian.

Earlier on Sunday, Leo met the Bishops of France. The Vatican's official programme set that meeting for 09:00 in Lourdes in the Saint Bernadette auditorium. In a separate address for that meeting, Leo told the bishops they had acted with determination against "the painful scourge of abuse committed against minors by members of the clergy or in an ecclesial context," meaning in church settings Vatican. He urged them "to continue along the path you have begun, maintaining the greatest vigilance." He added: "Do not be discouraged by the errors, inconsistencies or even falls that have marked the history of this pilgrim people."

The private meeting with survivors comes after the public Mass and the bishops' meeting. Several survivors said in a press release last week that Leo would meet seven survivors of abuse by Catholic clergy in Lourdes on Sunday. Among those expected is a former pupil of the Notre-Dame de Bétharram Catholic boarding school near Lourdes. The meeting has not been opened to the press.

Sexual abuse in the French Church affected at least 330,000 children over seven decades, according to the Guardian report on the visit. France's Independent National Authority for Recognition and Reparation, the body that handles claims and payments to victims, announced last week that about 2,000 people who reported sexual abuse by clergy or other church representatives were seeking reparations. At Lourdes itself, mosaics by Jesuit priest Marko Rupnik were boarded up, and the bishop of Lourdes ordered them covered so abuse survivors would not be forced to see them. Rupnik is on trial in a Vatican court accused by more than two dozen women of psychological, spiritual and sexual abuse from the 1990s.

The Lourdes stop is part of a four-day Apostolic Journey, the formal term for an official papal trip, to France scheduled for 25-28 September. It is the first visit to France by a pope in 18 years. France's bishops announced in early May 2026 that a visit by Leo at the end of September was likely. The September journey was Leo's fifth international Apostolic Journey.

Leo has held such private meetings before. He met with a group of survivors of clerical abuse from Belgium in a climate of "closeness, deep listening, and painful dialogue."

The broader context here is institutional rather than only pastoral. To the crowd, the language was purification and humility. To the bishops, it was determination and vigilance. The first acknowledges failure by dioceses and religious orders without naming cases. The second affirms the French bishops' existing safeguarding structures, the rules to prevent abuse, while leaving enforcement with them.

In my view, the test will be procedural. That means reparations caseloads, whether dioceses follow the rules, and what happens to sites and artworks linked to accused clergy, as with the covered Rupnik mosaics at Lourdes. Looking at what this means for the French Church, the near-term questions are whether the bishops' conference tightens reporting and reparation timelines after the 09:00 exchange, and whether the Vatican court process around Rupnik changes decisions about his works in pilgrimage spaces.