LOURDES, France (OSV News) — Amid the wheelchairs, crutches, and prayer intentions of the 150,000 pilgrims in Lourdes, France, Sept. 27, the pope spoke out strongly against the practice of assisted suicide for the sick and abortion of the disabled, designating the Marian shrine as a blessed place for “professing the beauty and sanctity of life.”
“Dear brothers and sisters who are sick, I want to tell you that you are not a burden,” Pope Leo said in his meeting with patients and caretakers at the Accueil Notre Dame in the Lourdes sanctuary. “You are the beating heart of our humanity and a precious treasure for the Church.”
“No one ever has the right on the basis of laboratory algorithms, to decide the life of a given embryo or elderly person!” the pope emphasized. “Medicine must never become the servant of programmed death.”
The pope’s words were met with fierce enthusiasm and prolonged applause from both the patients and staff of the Lourdes’ medical facility.
Pope Leo delivered the speech after listening to the moving testimony of a paraplegic woman who slowly made her way with assistance up on stage to speak to him.
Pope Leo rejects ‘false compassion’ of assisted dying
“No human law should ever make you lose the certainty of your dignity. On the contrary, 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,” Pope Leo told the sick and disabled.
“It is impossible to regard causing death as something normal. What is legal is not necessarily moral,” he underlined.
Pope Leo’s first full day at the Marian shrine began with a sunny morning Mass in a field near the grotto where the Virgin Mary appeared to a poor and uneducated 14-year-old Bernadette Soubirous 18 times in 1858 in the Grotto of Massabielle near the southwestern French town at the foot of the Pyrenees mountains.
In his homily, the pope expressed gratitude for how “life is welcomed here as a precious gift from God, and is called to flourish forever in the love of the Father.”
“In the face of current trends that seek to redefine the value of human life in illness, suffering
and old age, the grotto of Massabielle stands as a place of Christian hope. Here, no one is turned away due to their frailty,” Pope Leo said.
“Your crutches, your wheelchairs and your hidden tears are not obstacles; instead, they are the very place where you are fully respected and welcomed, and where you can experience a transforming encounter with the infinite love of God,” he told the pilgrims.
Gabriella Panizzardi, 84, from Milan, Italy, was among the many of those present at the Mass in a wheelchair, accompanied by her son Marco. She said that she keeps coming back again and again because of the “sense of serenity” in Lourdes.
“Look at this heavenly sight, something out of the ordinary — it brings such peace. Yes, everyone loves one another and helps those who are sick. It’s beautiful, truly,” Panizzardi told OSV News.
‘Your role is irreplaceable,’ Pope Leo tells the sick
Lourdes is the fourth most visited Catholic pilgrimage site in the world, drawing people from across continents to the site of the Marian apparition where thousands of physical healing miracles have been reported for the past 168 years.
Looking out at the crowd, Pope Leo spoke directly to those pilgrims who came to the Marian shrine carrying the weight of their personal sufferings and told them that they have a great mission.
“Dear friends who are sick, so many of you here in Lourdes are familiar with suffering,” he said. “You can live your trials and pains in this spirit of offering, and so take part in the redemptive work that the world so greatly needs.”
“Your role is irreplaceable,” he told those who are sick or suffering. “You are truly at the heart of the Church.”
Motto of the papal trip: ‘That the world may have life’
The motto for Pope Leo’s four-day apostolic visit to France is “That the world may have life” (John 6:51), a theme that resonates with the faithful in the country after a vote by French lawmakers in July to legalize “assisted dying,” including euthanasia and assisted suicide in certain cases, a move that French bishops called a “radical choice.”
The defence of life from conception to natural death has been a consistent theme in the pope’s addresses, from his speech to French lawmakers in Paris Sept. 25 to his meeting with the sick and their caretakers Sept. 27 outside of the Lourdes medical facility.
“Here in Lourdes, the city of the sick and of hope, I appeal to the entire healthcare community to remember the profound meaning of your vocation, which is to care for a suffering person, not to eliminate that person,” the pope said at the meeting.
At the morning Mass, Pope Leo expressed great affection for the witness of the Marian shrine, which draws thousands of sick and disabled people on annual pilgrimages.
“Lourdes is blessed as a place for professing the beauty and sanctity of life, for life is welcomed here as a precious gift from God, and is called to flourish for ever in the love
of the Father,” he said.
Among those in the crowd at the Mass was 19-year-old Paul Hourcade, who described his experience at Lourdes with Pope Leo as transformative, saying, “when we see all these people who come to turn to our Lord Jesus Christ, it’s very beautiful to see.”
“Yesterday, I was amazed to see people that were confessing their sins to a priest when they were waiting for the pope. And it was amazing to see,” the teenager added.
Urgency of repentance
Pope Leo also preached about the urgency of repentance and the importance of penance, recalling the words of Our Lady of Lourdes in the apparition to St. Bernadette, “‘Penance! Penance! Penance!'”
“The Virgin asks us to do penance not only for ourselves, because we too need it, but also ‘for sinners,’ for a world that is going astray,” the pope added.
On Sunday evening, after meeting with the sick and disabled at the medical facility, Pope Leo is scheduled to meet privately with victims of clerical abuse at the Marian shrine. Ahead of the pope’s visit, mosaics by Father Marko Rupnik, who has been accused by over 20 women of spiritual and sexual abuse, were covered out of respect for the abuse victims who come to Lourdes seeking hope and healing.
Pope Leo acknowledged in his homily in Lourdes that the Church itself also has an urgent need of conversion, saying that the Church “must have the courage to begin with herself.”
“In order to heal the deep wounds, infidelities and painful errors that have occurred within her, we must humbly place ourselves under the Lord’s purifying gaze. Recognizing our own faults is essential to our spiritual growth,” Pope Leo said.
After the Mass, Pope Leo led the crowd in praying the Angelus prayer and appealed to Catholics to pray the rosary during the month of October with the specific intention that “wars may cease and peace be established among peoples in conflict,” asking Catholics to accompany this prayer with concrete acts of penance and mercy, and a commitment to always foster dialogue and reconciliation.
“Dear friends who are sick, so many of you here in Lourdes are familiar with suffering. You can live your trials and pains in this spirit of offering, and so take part in the redemptive work that the world so greatly needs,” he said. “In this way, you are truly at the heart of the Church, and your role is irreplaceable. Pilgrims, brothers and sisters, you will not leave Lourdes as you arrived.”
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Courtney Mares is Vatican editor for OSV News. Follow her on X @catholicourtney.
