In Lourdes, Pope Leo Confronts Abuse and a French Law

Pope Leo XIV met seven survivors of clergy child abuse in the French pilgrimage town of Lourdes on Sunday, an encounter Al Jazeera described as emotional and lasting two hours, during which the head of the Roman Catholic Church pledged action on the issue.

Le Monde reported that the pope also called on bishops to remain vigilant over sexual abuse in the Church and criticised France's newly adopted assisted-dying legislation, delivering both messages from Lourdes rather than from Paris.

The visit, Leo's four-day tour of a secular France, had already drawn an estimated 800,000 people to a Mass in Paris on Saturday, according to the Vatican's figure carried by CBS News. The BBC framed the Paris Mass as the high point of the trip.

The New York Times read the journey as a statement of method: after visiting Africa, the paper wrote, Leo's French trip shows how he is seeking to appeal both to Roman Catholicism's original heartlands and to its newest strongholds. France, in that reading, is the test of whether the older constituency can still be addressed directly.

Not everything in the visit ran smoothly. France 24 reported that the Vatican's recent excommunication of followers of the Society of Saint Pius X, an ultra-conservative Catholic splinter sect, had revived a longstanding feud within the Church ahead of the state visit. The group, the outlet noted, has built an extensive network of schools.

The abuse meeting and the intervention on assisted dying both came at Lourdes, and both were reported by Le Monde as appeals directed at the French Church rather than at the French state. The pope's criticism of the assisted-dying law places the Church's position on record against legislation France has already adopted.

For Italy, the trip carries a specific weight. The Vatican sits within Rome, and the Holy See's relations with the Italian state, with Italian bishops and with the country's Catholic institutions are a standing feature of domestic life. A pope who speaks in France about abuse and about the end of life is speaking, in practice, to a Church that is also Italian.

Abruzzo's own religious geography is quieter than that of Lourdes. The region's shrines and mountain sanctuaries draw local pilgrimage rather than international crowds, and the wire items do not connect the French visit to any Abruzzo institution. La Veduta makes no such claim.

What the coverage establishes is a papacy willing to raise difficult subjects in public, in a country where Mass attendance is low and the Church's standing has been tested. Whether that approach travels back across the Alps is the question the foreign press has left open.