TARBES (FRANCE)
The Tablet [Market Harborough, England]
September 27, 2026
By Tom Heneghan
A meeting with seven victims of abuse, scheduled for one hour, lasted for almost two and ended with several praising the Pope for his ability to listen.
Pope Leo XIV spent a hectic third day in France on Sunday encouraging its hard-pressed bishops and priests, meeting victims of the sexual abuse scandal and defending the Church’s opposition to the legalisation of assisted suicide and euthanasia.
In the Lourdes sanctuary known for reportedly miraculous cures, he said a Mass for 150,000 pilgrims on a field across from the grotto where Bernadette Soubirous said the Virgin Mary appeared to her in 1858.
The US-born Pope was enthusiastically received in the southwestern French town after two days in Paris, where he led a prayer vigil for 80,000 young people on Friday evening and saw an estimated 800,000 pack the Champs Élysées for his Mass on the Place de la Concorde on Saturday.
Sunday began with a meeting with French bishops agreeably surprised by the rising numbers of teenagers and young adults requesting baptism while overall membership continued to fall and the sexual abuse scandal still hobbles the shrinking Church.
Despite the “immense challenges of our time”, the Pope told the bishops: “I urge you to show courage, boldness and missionary creativity. Do not be discouraged by the errors, inconsistencies or even falls that have marked the history of this pilgrim people.”
“He called for a lot of courage, but also much confidence,” Bishop Bruno Valentin of Carcassonne-Narbonne told KTO television after the meeting. “There is no reason to look to the future with fear.”
Adult baptisms in France have almost doubled in the past two years while baptisms of teenagers have tripled in the last three years. “It is important that you carefully nurture this grace,” said the Pope, who met catechumens and newly-baptised Catholics on Saturday in Paris.
The bishops are now struggling to integrate these new Catholics, who often don’t know the Church well and have different ways of approaching the faith. Bishops from the greater Paris area gave him a working document they use to study ways to serve these newcomers.
In his speech, the Pope also mentioned France’s strict Church-State split – laïcité – which some say is now being tightened. “I urge you to remain vigilant in defending the freedom and rights of the Church,” he said.
As in other Western countries, he continued, “we see a troubling polarisation, a decline in fraternity, cordiality and the quality of social life, and a resurgence of violence, inequality and poverty”.
The Pope also mentioned “the painful scourge of abuse committed against minors by members of the clergy” and noted the “courageous measures to respond through listening, the search for truth, justice, forgiveness and making amends”.
“You must continue along the path you have begun, maintaining the greatest vigilance,” he said, before meeting seven victims of sexual abuse later in the day.
An official report in 2021, when the Church began taking victim compensation seriously, estimated that 330,000 minors were abused between 1950 and 2020 by about 3,000 priests and church workers. The Church has since created large funds to compensate victims, but the damage has been done and will weigh on it for years.
The meeting, due to last an hour, went almost two hours and several victims left praising the Pope.
“This thing happened to me 65 years ago, and I lost the faith. Today I found it again,” one man said. A woman added: “I’ve rarely met someone who listens so profoundly … for many of them, this meeting marks a turnaround after years of silence.”
According to La Croix, Pope Leo praised the work the French Church had undertaken but agreed that “still a great deal had to be done”.
It quoted a man as saying: “For him, the perpetrators are individuals, but the fact that this can be perpetrated and spread is due to its systemic dimension.” The victims were not identified.
At the Universal Prayer during his Mass in Lourdes, lay people spoke their requests in five different languages, all ending with a phrase that translates as “that the world may have life”.
That motto of the trip is seen as a veiled criticism of the French government, which recently legalised assisted suicide and euthanasia despite Church opposition.
Pope Leo was clearer in his address to ailing pilgrims, many in wheelchairs or using walkers. The Church approves of palliative care at the end of life but no further.
“We must reject the temptation to cause death under the guise of false compassion,” he said. “It is impossible to regard causing death as something normal. What is legal is not necessarily moral.”
The Pope arrived in Lourdes on Saturday evening and visited the grotto, where he prayed for “the gift of fraternal harmony” for France.
His last scheduled appearance on Sunday evening was the traditional torchlight procession and Rosary around the sanctuary.