Pope to meet victims of clerical sex abuse on France trip

Pope Leo XIV is on a four-day official visit to France, the first papal trip there in nearly two decades. He arrived in the pilgrimage town of Lourdes on Saturday evening and held an open-air mass for hundreds of thousands of worshippers.

On Sunday, the Pope is meeting privately with seven victims of clerical sex abuse. According to a 2021 inquiry, clergy or lay members of the Church had abused about 330,000 people as minors in France over 70 years. One of the victims meeting the Pope is a former pupil of the Notre-Dame de Betharram institution, a boarding school at the centre of widespread accusations of physical and sexual abuse.

The Pope's visit comes at a significant time in France, months ahead of a presidential election. During his visit, he prayed at the Grotto of Massabielle, where Catholic tradition holds that the Virgin Mary appeared in 1858 to a peasant girl, later canonised as Saint Bernadette. The Local France reports that the Pope waved at believers on his way to mass on Sunday.

Brief written by urgent.news from The Local France, Punch Nigeria, South China Morning Post, Le Monde English, Malay Mail — 5 reports on this story. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.