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Pope Leo XIV called on the Catholic Church to repent of its own failures on Sunday at Lourdes, hours before a private meeting with seven survivors of clergy sexual abuse.
“This call to conversion also concerns the Church herself as she makes her earthly journey,” he said in his homily on the shrine’s prairie. “She must have the courage to begin with herself.”
He came to that message on his knees. On Saturday night Leo knelt before the grotto of Massabielle and stayed there for nearly four minutes, while a crowd that had been chanting his name along the river Gave de Pau fell silent.
The next morning, on the prairie across the river, he told the same pilgrims why he had come. “It is today, not tomorrow, that we must repent,” he said in his homily at Sunday’s Mass in Lourdes.
Lourdes is the second leg of a four-day journey that has already taken the American pope from the Élysée Palace to the Place de la Concorde. On Friday he met Emmanuel Macron, and the two men, who part ways on abortion and euthanasia, agreed on the need to pursue peace. They discussed the war in Ukraine and the Middle East out of “a shared commitment to working for peace and dialogue.”
Leo also told France’s political class that “the protection of every human life is a duty incumbent upon each and every one of us,” then drew 80,000 young people to the Stade de France that night.
Saturday began in a small migrant center in the 18th arrondissement, Maison Bakhita, and ended with an estimated 800,000 people at the Concorde. That evening he was at the grotto where Catholics believe the Virgin Mary appeared to Bernadette Soubirous, a miller’s daughter, eighteen times in 1858.
He touched the rock, as every pilgrim does, drank from the spring, lit a candle, and laid a Golden Rose before the statue of the Immaculate Conception. Then he prayed aloud for the country that has hosted him since Friday.
“Obtain for France wise and generous leaders, ready to make sacrifices, capable of responding to challenges, and eager to serve the common good,” he prayed. He asked that those leaders help the world reject “the mentality of war once and for all,” a line that would land in any capital on earth this fall, including our own.
Sunday’s readings, from Ezekiel and Matthew’s parable of the two sons, gave Leo the theme he chose to preach on Bernadette’s ground: conversion. He reminded the crowd of what the Virgin told the girl in 1858, “I do not promise to make you happy in this world but in the next,” and said that promise “challenges the way we think today.”
The homily was not an abstraction. France’s National Assembly voted 291 to 241 in July to let adults with incurable illnesses receive lethal medication, and Leo was preaching to a field full of exactly the people that law has in view.
“In the face of current trends that seek to redefine the value of human life in illness, suffering and old age, the grotto of Massabielle stands as a place of Christian hope,” he said. Then he spoke to the sick directly: “Your crutches, your wheelchairs and your hidden tears are not obstacles.”
Americans should not hear that as a French problem. As I reported on Thursday, the Trump administration is writing a rule that could cut or end Supplemental Security Income for as many as 400,000 disabled adults who live with their families.
Leo also turned the call to conversion on the institution he leads. The Virgin’s cry of “Penance! Penance! Penance!” is meant for “a world that is going astray,” he said, and he asked how any heart could stay unmoved by “the conflicts that are spreading and destroying so many innocent lives,” two days after calling war “the most terrible of human works” in Paris.
Near the end of the homily, Leo returned to the Church’s own sins. To heal “the deep wounds, infidelities and painful errors that have occurred within her,” he told the pilgrims, “we must humbly place ourselves under the Lord’s purifying gaze.”
Before the bishops sat down with him, Leo stopped at a photograph of a weeping child on the wall of the hall where they meet. The bishops hung it there in November 2021, when they gathered to answer the CIASE report, which estimated that some 330,000 children had been abused in the French Church since 1950.
The photographer is a survivor who was abused by a priest at age eight, and his words hang beside the image.
Leo had pressed the same point on France’s bishops that morning. Meeting them at the shrine before Mass, he thanked them for the “courageous measures” they had taken against “the painful scourge of abuse committed against minors by members of the clergy,” then added, “You must continue along the path you have begun, maintaining the greatest vigilance.” He urged them to “always have the courage to acknowledge failings with a love of the truth and a determination to bind up wounds with the charity of the Good Shepherd.”
The shrine had made that sentence concrete before he spoke it. The basilica’s mosaics by Marko Rupnik, the former Jesuit on trial at the Vatican over allegations of abuse, had been boarded up. This afternoon Leo meets privately with seven survivors of abuse, among them victims of diocesan priests, of the Notre-Dame de Bétharram school, and of Abbé Pierre, in a meeting listed on the official program of the journey.
The survivors set their own terms in a statement before the meeting. “Dialogue is not endorsement,” they wrote.
Leo has sat across from survivors before. Last October, as I wrote at the time, he became the first pope to meet with an organized group of abuse survivors and advocates, the board of Ending Clergy Abuse. His predecessors had met victims one by one but kept such groups at arm’s length.
He closed with a word for the pilgrims going home, and he meant it for more than France. “You will not leave Lourdes as you arrived,” Leo said. “You will leave as missionaries of hope.” Tonight he leads the rosary and the torchlight procession, and on Monday he flies to Metz for the last day of the journey.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with Pope Leo XIV and with the sick and elderly pilgrims who filled the prairie at Lourdes this morning, whose lives no law and no president can make less precious in the sight of God.
Leo prayed at the grotto for leaders who serve the common good. His summons to a Church that repents first belongs to us as well, American Catholics and people of goodwill watching our own country decide what the weak are worth.
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Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.
This is incredible journey Pope Leo is on. It's critical to address the global harm the church was part of in the sexual abuse of children. Moral leadership demands speaking the truth .
Yes, because admitting mistakes allows for growth anf becoming even better.
Everyone makes mistakes. Admitting them makes you stronger.