Here’s How the Meeting Between the Pope and 7 Abuse Victims in Lourdes Unfolded (As Told by the Victims Themselves)

(ZENIT News / Lourdes, 09.28.2026).- On Sunday, September 27, during his visit to Lourdes, Pope Leo XIV met privately with seven people who had survived sexual abuse connected to the Catholic Church in France. The group—four men and three women, selected by the French bishops—spoke with the Pope individually and then together. The meeting, originally planned to last an hour, continued for nearly two, giving each participant time to describe their experience and put forward proposals for change.

The encounter took place against the backdrop of France’s continuing reckoning with clerical abuse. A landmark independent report published in 2021 estimated that approximately 216,000 people had been abused by priests or other clergy between 1950 and 2020. Including abuse by laypeople working for Church institutions, such as teachers and camp counselors, the estimate rose to 330,000. The broader figure has been challenged because it relies on statistical projection rather than a direct count. In response to the report, French bishops adopted 26 measures focused on reparations and prevention; around 2,000 people have since approached the Church’s reparations body.

The seven survivors who met Leo represented different chapters of that history. One had been abused by Abbé Pierre, the priest celebrated for founding the Emmaus movement and defending people experiencing homelessness. His public reputation was profoundly shaken in 2024, when allegations of sexual assault by more than two dozen women came to light, including allegations involving women who were minors at the time.

After the Lourdes meeting, five participants spoke to journalists. Olivier Mardi, cofounder of the advocacy group Voix Libérées de Touraine, said the Pope had listened attentively and was aware that the danger of abuse had not disappeared. “He is no fool,” Mardi said, stressing that the Church must remain vigilant. He added that Leo had responded positively to the survivors’ concrete proposals, while making clear that they would continue to watch for follow-through.

Jérôme Guillement, who had testified to the commission behind the 2021 report, described the Pope’s words as carefully chosen and said the exchange felt sincere. For Jean-Marie Delbos, a key witness in the abuse scandal surrounding the Bétharram school, the encounter also carried a deeply personal dimension. Having lost his faith around 65 years earlier, he attended Mass for the first time in roughly six decades and received the Pope’s blessing. Another participant, Véronique Garnier, was abused by a parish priest in Nancy and is now involved with the group Foi & Résilience.

The Vatican said Leo thanked the survivors for their painful testimony and reaffirmed his commitment to ensuring that what they endured would not happen to others. The Pope also prayed with some of them at the close of their conversations. Participants said he appeared familiar with their cases and attentive to what they had to say, but they did not present the meeting as a resolution: they are waiting to see whether their proposals lead to decisions.

One proposal, raised by Delbos, was the dissolution of the Bétharram religious congregation, which operates institutions in Africa and Latin America. The survivors’ broader requests, the reports said, concerned practical measures and accountability.

Earlier that day, the Pope had addressed the French bishops, praising the Church’s efforts to confront abuse through listening, truth-seeking, justice, forgiveness, reparation and prevention. Cardinal Jean-Marc Aveline of Marseille, who introduced Leo at the meeting, described a change in the bishops’ perspective: learning to view abuse from the standpoint of victims, he said, had begun a demanding process of conversion and prevention that must continue in cooperation with survivors and the wider Church.

The issue was also visible at the Lourdes sanctuary itself. Bishop Jean-Marc Micas of Tarbes-Lourdes had covered mosaics on the basilica’s façade created by Marko Rupnik, a priest accused of widespread abuse. The bishop later said Leo had praised the decision. Before the papal visit, five abuse survivors of Rupnik had sent the Pope an open letter welcoming the removal of the mosaics while criticizing what they described as a lack of transparency in the Vatican proceedings concerning Rupnik. “A trial held in darkness offers security to no one,” they wrote, referring both to the accused and to survivors.

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