By Joshua McElwee and Makini Brice
LOURDES, France, Sept 27 (Reuters) – Pope Leo reaffirmed his commitment to ending abuse of children by Catholic priests in a meeting with French abuse survivors on Sunday, the Vatican said, hours after the pontiff urged the Church to admit its own failings and heal its “deep wounds.”
In a two-hour meeting with seven survivors in France, where Leo is on a three-city weekend visit, the pope met privately with each of the victims and heard proposals for how to improve the Church’s safeguarding measures, a Vatican statement said.
“He thanked them for their painful testimony and reaffirmed his commitment to ensuring that the harm they experienced is not repeated for others,” it said.
The survivors said after the meeting that it was emotional and touching. They said they felt listened to by the pontiff and they were impressed by his compassion and his knowledge of their individual cases, but they also hoped that the words would be accompanied by action.
“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,” Jérôme Guillement said.
Leo is on a whirlwind four-day visit to France. Local Church leaders are hoping he will help repair the Church’s standing after a 2021 report found that some 330,000 French children had been abused by Catholic clergy and lay leaders over seven decades.
The pope told an estimated 150,000 people gathered for a Mass in a field near the famed Catholic shrine in Lourdes earlier on Sunday that the Church must have the courage to face its past.
“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 said.
Véronique Garnier, one of the survivors in the meeting with the pope, said she had found the Mass, in which Leo referred to abuse without directly apologising for it, troubling and wondered why she had attended.
But she said she was encouraged by her meeting with Leo.
“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.
Leo also spoke about the abuse scandals in a closed-door meeting with French bishops on Sunday, according to a Vatican-provided text.
The pope thanked the bishops for the “courageous measures” he said they had taken to confront the scandals and urged them to buttress their safeguarding efforts and “continue on the path undertaken, maintaining the greatest vigilance.”
Leo has drawn large crowds on his visit to France. Around 800,000 people came for an outdoor Mass on the Champs-Élysées with the pope in Paris on Saturday. He has also again urged the world to reconsider the development of artificial intelligence.
‘CANNOT IGNORE THIS ISSUE’
Leo has previously apologised directly for abuse scandals that have damaged the Church’s credibility across the world. On a trip to Spain in June, he told bishops there that they must listen to survivors and offer them reparations.
Bishop Pierre-Antoine Bozo, the spokesperson for the French bishops, said the pope’s desire to have the meeting “shows that we cannot ignore this issue and that it must always remain among our concerns.”
The pope’s itinerary in France included six events in Lourdes, a town in the foothills of the Pyrenees mountains that attracts some 3 million pilgrims a year for visits to a shrine to the Virgin Mary and purported healing spring waters.
The site is also connected to a scandal that has dogged the Vatican in recent years. The shrine’s facade has a series of mosaics by Rev. Marko Rupnik, a prominent religious artist with Vatican ties, who has been accused of sexual abuse.
Rupnik, accused by more than 20 women, is not known to have commented publicly on the accusations. Five of his alleged victims wrote an open letter to the pope on Thursday, sharply criticising an ongoing Vatican trial of the cleric.
The mosaics, stories tall, have been covered for the pope’s visit with large, muted yellow tarps. Arriving for the Mass on Sunday, Leo was driven in his open-top popemobile near the facade of the shrine and the covered mosaics.
The pope, who on Friday sharply reiterated Catholic opposition to assisted dying initiatives two months after France created a legal right to die for those with incurable illnesses, again mentioned the Church’s pro-life stance in Lourdes.
Meeting with volunteers who help sick pilgrims hoping to find a miracle in the shrine’s waters, Leo urged them to remember the “profound meaning” of healthcare work.
“That is to care for a suffering person, not to eliminate that person,” the pope said. “Medicine must never become the servant of programmed death!”
(Reporting by Joshua McElwee in Lourdes; Additional reporting by Michaela Cabrera and Clotaire Achi in Lourdes, Elizabeth Pineau in Metz and Makini Brice in Paris; Editing by Alex Richardson, Nia Williams and Mark Porter)
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