Pope demands 'greatest vigilance' against clergy abuse during France visit

Pope Leo arrived in Lourdes on the third day of his four-day official visit to France with a single, unambiguous message for the country's bishops: the Catholic Church's record of sexual abuse demanded their unrelenting attention. Behind closed doors at the Sanctuary of Our Holy Lady of Lourdes, in southern France, he told them to maintain "the greatest vigilance" against what he called the "scourge" of abuse by clergy and church members. The words carried weight because the numbers behind them were staggering. A 2021 inquiry had documented that roughly 330,000 people had been abused as children by Catholic clergy or lay members in France over the course of seven decades—a finding that had shaken the French church and forced a reckoning that remained incomplete.

The Pope's visit to Lourdes was not merely rhetorical. After addressing thousands of worshippers at Mass, he sat down with seven survivors of abuse. Jean-Marie Delbos, one of them, emerged from the meeting visibly moved. "It was extraordinary," he said at a news conference afterward. The Pope had listened carefully, Delbos explained, and had been genuinely informed about their cases. "I never thought I would have a Pope before me," he added—a simple statement that carried the weight of decades of institutional silence and dismissal. The Vatican released a statement saying Leo had thanked the survivors for their testimony and reaffirmed his commitment to preventing such harm from occurring again.

The Lourdes gathering was the centerpiece of a visit that had already drawn enormous crowds. A day earlier, an estimated 700,000 people had gathered at the Place de la Concorde in Paris to hear him speak. He had ridden down the Champs-Élysées in an open-topped popemobile, waving to cheering followers. On Friday, he had met with French President Emmanuel Macron. The scale of public interest stood in sharp contrast to the state of Catholic practice in France itself. Regular church attendance had collapsed from 35 percent of the population in 1960 to less than 5 percent today. The number of priests had shrunk by two-thirds, from 25,000 in 1990 to fewer than 9,000. The institutional decline was real and measurable.

Yet there were small signs of reversal. Adult baptisms had more than doubled in five years, reaching 10,000 in 2025. Whether this represented a genuine renewal or merely a statistical blip remained unclear, but it suggested that interest in Catholic tradition had not entirely evaporated among French adults. The Pope addressed young people directly during Saturday's Mass in Paris, calling them "today's Church" and praising their enthusiasm and energy. He urged Catholics not to keep their faith private but to "let it overflow so that those you meet may be refreshed"—a call to visibility and witness in a country where Catholicism had become marginal.

The abuse crisis Leo confronted in France was neither new nor isolated. Sexual abuse within the Catholic Church had been documented since the 1950s, but it did not receive sustained media attention until the 1980s in the United States and Canada. The Boston Globe's reporting in the early 2000s—later dramatized in the 2015 film Spotlight—exposed the systematic nature of the abuse and revealed how church leaders had moved accused priests from parish to parish rather than holding them accountable. A Church-commissioned report in 2004 found that more than 4,000 U.S. priests had faced sexual abuse allegations over fifty years, involving more than 10,000 children, mostly boys. Similar patterns emerged in Ireland, the UK, and eventually across the world.

Leo's predecessor, Pope Francis, had attempted to address the crisis through an unprecedented summit on clerical abuse and by changing church law to explicitly criminalize sexual abuse. But the problems persisted. Leo's visit to France and his direct words to bishops suggested he intended to maintain that pressure, at least rhetorically. Whether institutional change would follow remained to be seen. The Pope spent the remainder of Sunday meeting with staff and residents at Lourdes's health facility and participating in a torchlight procession. This was his first official visit to France since being chosen to lead the Roman Catholic Church in May 2025. France, despite its secular modern political identity, retained deep Catholic roots, and popes had regularly visited. What Leo would accomplish beyond words—whether his call for vigilance would translate into structural reform, whether survivors would see meaningful accountability—remained an open question as his visit drew to a close.