Pope Leo Calls Assisted Dying 'False Compassion' Before Crowds of Sick Pilgrims at Lourdes
On his third day in France, the pope told worshippers that 'what is legal is not necessarily moral,' weeks after French lawmakers approved lethal medication for the incurably ill.
Pope Leo XIV condemned medically assisted dying as immoral on Sunday, telling crowds at Lourdes, the French shrine famous for reported miraculous cures, that legalizing it amounts to "false compassion."
"It is precisely in the name of this inalienable dignity of the human person that we must reject the temptation to cause death under the guise of false compassion," Leo said, drawing applause. "What is legal is not necessarily moral." Many of those at the Mass were in wheelchairs. Afterward the pope visited a care center for the sick on the shrine's grounds and told people living in "terrible pain" that they have a dignity no law or algorithm can "eliminate."
The remarks put the pope squarely inside a fight that divided French politics for years before lawmakers recently passed legislation letting adults with incurable illnesses receive lethal medication. It was the third day of Leo's visit to France, the first papal state visit there in 18 years, and he has repeatedly returned to Catholic teaching that life must be protected from conception to natural death. The trip has drawn huge crowds, including an estimated 800,000 people at his Mass on Paris' Place de la Concorde.
"Your crutches, your wheelchairs and your hidden tears are not obstacles; instead, they are the very place where you are fully respected and welcomed," Leo said in his homily. Lourdes became one of the world's great pilgrimage sites after the church recognized visions of the Virgin Mary reported by a young girl in 1858. The church has recognized 72 cures there as miraculous, and millions of pilgrims, many of them sick or disabled, visit each year.
Leo also used the day to confront the abuse crisis that has shaken the French church. He was scheduled to meet seven survivors of clergy abuse, including one abused as an adult. A 2021 independent report estimated that 330,000 children were abused over 70 years by some 3,000 priests and church workers in France. Bishops set up an independent compensation system that has so far recommended payouts of more than 20 million euros, about $22.7 million. Meeting French bishops Sunday morning, Leo praised their response but acknowledged the scandal has fed a collapse in priestly vocations.
Some victims say the church has not gone far enough. In an open letter published by the newspaper Libération, a group of survivors asked the pope to acknowledge the church's responsibility and complained that only seven of them, chosen by the church, would meet him. "The Church must relinquish its position as both judge and party to the proceedings," they wrote. Monsignor Pierre-Antoine Bozo, spokesman for the bishops' conference, said the pope wanted a small group so he could truly listen.
Lourdes carries another reminder of the crisis. One of its basilica facades was designed by the Rev. Marko Rupnik, the mosaic artist now on trial in a Vatican court, accused by more than two dozen women of abuse that began in the 1990s. Five of those women wrote to Leo before the trip, praising the decision to cover the mosaics but saying decades of silence had felt like "a further, continuous violence."
