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

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LOURDES, France — Pope Leo XIV met privately on Sunday with seven adult survivors of child sexual abuse by members of the French clergy, spending nearly two hours with them at the sanctuary in the southwestern pilgrimage town before appearing with them at a press conference. The Vatican described the encounter as emotional, and several of those involved said afterwards that they felt heard by the head of the world's 1.4 billion Catholics.

In a statement, the Vatican said the pope had thanked the survivors "for their painful testimony" and had "reaffirmed his commitment" to end the harm inflicted by Catholic priests. The meeting is the most direct confrontation between Leo and French abuse victims during a four-day visit to France that has also been dominated by other contested subjects, including assisted dying and the Church's place in French public life.

The survivors — identified as Veronique Garnier, Olivier Mardi, Jerome Guillement, Bertrand Virieux and Jean-Marie Delbos, among others — posed together with the pope at the news conference following the meeting. Their decision to appear publicly alongside him was itself notable, signalling a willingness to give the pontiff the benefit of the doubt while pressing him for commitments.

Delbos, 80, was told to describe the meeting as extraordinary. He was abused as a pupil at the boarding school of Notre-Dame de Betharram, near Lourdes, where staff have been accused over several decades of physical and sexual abuse. "When he saw the state I was in, he took me into his arms," Delbos said, adding that the moment was unlike anything he had anticipated.

Members of the group said they were not merely satisfied with the audience they received but struck by the level of personal attention they received. They said Leo appeared familiar with the particulars of their individual cases — a detail that suggests the Vatican had prepared in advance rather than treating the meeting as a symbolic gesture.

Their emphasis, however, fell on the gap between compassion and consequence. The survivors said they hoped the words they heard in Lourdes would be matched by concrete action, and several were explicit that they had heard fine language before. Guillement, who has written publicly about a priest abusing him as a teenager, said at the news conference that the pope grasped the systemic character of sexual abuse within the Church.

Guillement argued that the pope's view leaves room for two realities at once. "From his point of view, the perpetrators are individuals, but what allows it to continue is the systemic dimension within the institution," he said. In other words, the pope is thought to see the abuse as the work of discrete offenders, while also recognising that the structures of the institution are what have allowed it to persist and go unpunished.

He also offered a pointed assessment of the Church's record at home. "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." The remark suggests the meeting did not amount, in the survivors' view, to a settling of accounts — nor to an apology that closes the matter.

Garnier was the most openly ambivalent of the group. Earlier the same day, the pope addressed an estimated 150,000 people at a Mass in a field near the shrine, where he said the Church must have the courage to face its past. Garnier said she found that address troubling, noting that Leo referred to the abuse without apologising for it directly, and said she wondered why she had bothered to attend.

The Mass, however, was not the encounter that mattered most to her. Having sat with the pope, she said she had left encouraged. "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," she said. Her remarks capture the central tension of the visit: sympathy without contrition can be experienced by victims as an extension of the same failure to act.

Local leaders in Lourdes had hoped Leo's presence would help repair the Church's standing after a devastating 2021 independent inquiry. That commission estimated that some 330,000 French children had been abused by Catholic clergy and lay leaders over seven decades — a figure that has shadowed French Catholicism ever since and remains the reference point against which official responses are measured.

The pope also addressed the abuse scandals behind closed doors during a meeting with French bishops on Sunday, according to a text provided by the Vatican. The private session with the hierarchy is likely to be the more consequential of his two engagements on the subject, since the meeting with survivors addressed the wounds of individuals while the bishops' meeting confronted the institution that employed and protected the men responsible.

The Lourdes programme also included a candlelight procession at the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes, part of what the Vatican termed the pope's apostolic journey to France. The imagery of the pilgrimage site — where thousands of visitors come seeking healing — carried obvious symbolic weight for a visit centred on survivors seeking redress of a different kind.

Leo is expected to travel to the northeastern city of Metz on Monday before returning to Rome the same day. What happens next will determine whether the Lourdes meeting is remembered as a turning point or as another stop on a long road of apologies. The survivors themselves have set the test: not whether the pope speaks well about the abuse, but whether the institution he leads changes what it does with the knowledge it has long possessed.