Pope urges French bishops to 'persevere' against clerical sex abuse - IOL

Pope Leo XIV has urged French bishops to keep battling the "scourge" of clerical sex abuse.

Pope Leo XIV on Sunday urged French bishops to keep battling the "scourge" of clerical sex abuse during a trip to France, after repeated accusations against the Church in recent years.

The leader of the world's 1.4 billion Catholics was on a four-day trip to France, a secular country with deep Catholic roots, marking the first official papal visit there in nearly two decades.

"You have faced with determination the painful scourge of abuse of minors committed by members of the clergy or within an ecclesial context," he told the bishops during a private meeting in the pilgrimage town of Lourdes, according to a copy of his speech released to the press.

"It is important to persevere along the path you have begun, maintaining the greatest vigilance."

A 2021 inquiry found that clergy or lay members of the Church had abused about 330,000 minors in France over 70 years.

The first US pontiff was later Sunday to meet privately with seven of the victims, now adults, after promising to further efforts to reform the Church in the wake of the global sexual abuse scandal.

Among them is an 80-year-old man who was abused as a pupil at Notre-Dame de Betharram, a nearby boarding school at the centre of widespread accusations of physical and sexual abuse over several decades.

Catholic tradition says the Virgin Mary appeared to a peasant girl in a grotto in Lourdes in 1858, and the modern-day sanctuary is one of the most important Catholic holy sites in the world.

The southwestern French town receives some three million pilgrims each year, and believers credit it with miraculous healings.

On Sunday morning, hymns rang out in a packed field near the sanctuary after Pope Leo blessed the faithful with holy water.

"When we heard the Pope was coming to Lourdes, we booked our seats right away!" said 54-year-old Jerome Vion from Paris, wearing a lavender t-shirt marked "Generation Leo".

He approved of the pontiff's attention to victims of clerical abuse.

"It is his role as a spiritual master to guide this church, which has been through absolutely atrocious things - but has been in repentance for years," he said.

Domitille Bardoul, 26, said it was "very beautiful" that the pope was going to listen to victims.

"It's also a way of acknowledging that every possible measure is being taken to prevent this kind of abuse," she added.

Leo is the third pope to visit Lourdes after Benedict XVI in 2008 and Jean-Paul II in 1983 and 2004.

Addressing sick pilgrims on Sunday afternoon, Leo rejected assisted dying, after French parliament in June legalised the practice for certain adults suffering from an incurable condition.

"We must reject the temptation to cause death under the guise of false compassion," he said.

"What is legal is not necessarily moral."

The pope arrived in Lourdes on Saturday evening after a huge open-air mass on a Paris square and adjoining high-end shopping avenue.

Months ahead of a presidential election with the far-right surging and immigration high on the agenda, he prayed to the Virgin Mary to "obtain for France wise and generous leaders... eager to serve the common good".

Earlier in the afternoon, the 71-year-old pope led enthusiastic worshippers in a mass at Paris's Place de la Concorde, with just seven months to go before voters choose a successor to centrist President Emmanuel Macron.

A number of presidential hopefuls were present, including far-right leader Marine Le Pen and centrist Edouard Philippe.

Macron did not attend the mass but was represented by his wife Brigitte.