Pope Leo meets French child abuse survivors and urges Church to face its 'painful errors' in Lourdes

From the Newshound archive · first published 25 September 2026 · last updated 27 September 2026.

Pope Leo has met privately with a group of child sexual abuse survivors in Lourdes, calling the 'scourge' of clergy abuse a wound the Church must face and root out. The meeting came after the American pontiff told French bishops the Church must reckon with its 'painful errors', on the third day of his four-day apostolic journey across Paris, Lourdes and Metz. A 2021 report found around 330,000 French children had been abused by Catholic clergy and lay leaders over seven decades. Leo's Lourdes address follows a mass at Paris's Place de la Concorde on Saturday that drew an estimated 700,000 to 800,000 worshippers.

The Paris mass, the biggest public Catholic gathering France has seen in years, drew far more than the 600,000 who had registered — police opened two overflow sites.

Pope Leo, 71, delivered the Paris mass entirely in French, telling the crowd: 'Only God can fill the emptiness within us.'

The visit is the first official papal trip to France in 18 years; Leo also took aim at euthanasia legislation in Lourdes, where France recently legalised assisted dying.