LOURDES, France (AP) — Pope Leo XIV on Sunday took his opposition to euthanasia and medically assisted dying to Lourdes, the French Catholic shrine associated with miraculous cures and now also a place of healing for survivors of clergy sexual abuse.
Leo traveled to Lourdes in the foothills of the Pyrenees on the second leg of his four-day visit to France, the once staunchly Catholic but officially secular country. The visit has been marked by huge crowds — 800,000 at Leo's Mass on Paris' iconic Place de la Concorde — and his messaging against legislation allowing assisted dying that was recently approved in France and several other countries.
On Sunday, Leo met with French bishops and then celebrated Mass on the prairie next to Lourdes’ main basilica before an estimated 150,000 people. Hundreds of buses pulled into Lourdes early Sunday in a kilometers-long stream, depositing pilgrims onto the field. They cheered and waved when Leo arrived in his popemobile ahead of Mass.
Lourdes became a major pilgrimage destination after the Catholic Church officially recognized visions of the Virgin Mary reported here by a young girl in 1858.
The site near the Spanish border draws millions of pilgrims each year, especially sick and disabled believers hoping for a cure from the famed spring water in the Lourdes grotto where the visions purportedly occurred.
Leo arrived in Lourdes from Paris on Saturday night and immediately prayed inside the Grotto of Apparitions and drank from the spring.
“He has given a message of hope for France, a message of hope and greatness for France, and renewal for France," said Paris pilgrim Pierre Caziljc.
Pope delivers a message about life while in France
During his four-day visit to France, Leo has repeatedly called for a renewed respect for life in keeping with Catholic teaching that all human life must be protected and defended from conception until natural death. The teaching translates into firm opposition to abortion, euthanasia and medically assisted dying.
France’s National Assembly in 2024 enshrined abortion as a constitutional right and recently gave final approval to a bill allowing adults with incurable illnesses to receive lethal medication.
In Lourdes, where the church has recognized 72 “miraculous” cures as authentic, the question of respecting even the most frail, sick and vulnerable is particularly acute.
Survivors visit Lourdes as part of their healing process
More recently, Lourdes has also become a place of healing for survivors of clergy sexual abuse. Leo was to meet with seven survivors on Sunday, including one who was abused as an adult, in recognition of the new frontier of the abuse crisis facing the church.
The French church has endured a brutal reckoning with its legacy of abuse. An independent report in 2021 estimated 330,000 children had been abused over 70 years by some 3,000 priests and church workers.
Despite criticism of the report’s methodology and conclusions, French bishops put in place an independent system of compensation for victims that to date has recommended the church pay out more than 20 million euros ($22.7 million).
On the day Leo arrived in Paris, a group of victims wrote an open letter asking him to acknowledge the church’s responsibility and criticizing that the seven survivors were chosen by the church, not victims’ groups.
“The Church must relinquish its position as both judge and party to the proceedings,” they wrote in the letter published by French newspaper Liberation.
Monsignor Pierre-Antoine Bozo, spokesperson for the bishops’ conference, said two of the seven had actually been proposed by victims' groups and that Leo intentionally wanted to keep the group small to facilitate an intimate encounter.
“When it comes to listening to them, you can’t have 50 people in front of you,” he said. “So I think that’s really what the pope chose: to listen so that we can act and respond more effectively."
Mosaics are a painful reminder of alleged abuse
In Lourdes, Leo will also be reminded of a prickly abuse case inherited from Pope Francis.
The façade of one of the Lourdes basilicas was designed by the Rev. Marko Rupnik, one of the Catholic Church’s most famous mosaic artists.
Rupnik is currently on trial in a Vatican court, accused by more than two dozen women of having psychologically, spiritually and sexually abused them starting in the 1990s, including during the creation of his artworks.
His case was covered up for three decades by his Jesuit superiors, and even Francis was suspected of having protected his fellow Jesuit. In response to a media outcry, Francis ordered a canonical trial in 2024, which is ongoing.
The Rupnik case posed the question of what to do with his mosaics, which adorn basilicas around the world.
In 2024, Lourdes Bishop Jean-Marc Micas decided to no longer illuminate the façade of the Notre Dame du Rosaire Basilica at night. He subsequently ordered the decorated doors covered, and more recently decided to cover the façade’s mosaics entirely. He reasoned that abuse victims who come to Lourdes for healing shouldn’t be forced to see them.
In a letter to Leo ahead of his trip, five women who say they were abused by Rupnik praised Micas’ decision to cover the mosaics but criticized the Vatican’s treatment of their case and the three decades it has taken for them to be heard.
“This prolonged and loud silence has been experienced by us, the victims, as a further, continuous violence,” they wrote.
Bozo also praised Micas' decision to cover the works, though he said the decision was his alone and not that of the entire bishops' conference.
“It creates such a heavy symbolic burden for the victims,” he said. “For them, I think this had to be done."
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Associated Press writer Samuel Petrequin in Paris contributed to this report.
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