Pope Francis Underlines the Importance of Protecting Minors in the Church - FULL TEXT

MESSAGE OF THE HOLY FATHER
TO THE PARTICIPANTS AT THE PLENARY ASSEMBLY
OF THE PONTIFICAL COMMISSION FOR THE PROTECTION OF MINORS
[24-28 March 2025]
______________________________________________________________

Dear brothers and sisters,

I warmly send you my greetings and some directions for your valuable service. Indeed, it is like “oxygen” for local Churches and religious communities, because wherever a child or vulnerable person is safe, there you serve and honour Christ. In the daily pattern of your work – especially in the most disadvantaged areas – a prophetic truth becomes reality: abuse prevention is not a blanket to be spread over emergencies, but one of the foundations on which to build communities faithful to the Gospel. For this, I express my gratitude.

Your work cannot be reduced to protocols to be applied, but promotes safeguards: a formation that educates, checks that prevent, listening that restores dignity. When you establish prevention policies, even in the remotest communities, you are writing a promise: that every child, every vulnerable person, will find a safe environment in the ecclesial community. This is the motor of what should be for us an integral conversion.

Today, I ask you for three commitments:

1. To develop joint work with the Dicasteries of the Roman Curia.

2. To offer hospitality and care for the wounds of the soul to victims and survivors, in the style of the good Samaritan. To listen with the ear of the heart, so that every testimony finds not registers to be compiled, but the depths of mercy from which to be reborn.

3. To build alliances with entities outside the Church – civil authorities, experts, associations – so that protection may become a universal language.

In these ten years, you have enabled a safety network to grow within the Church. Keep going! Continue to be sentinels that keep watch while the world sleeps. May the Holy Spirit, teacher of living memory, preserve us from the temptation to file away grief instead of healing it.

Thank you for your remembrance in prayer. I too accompany you and I ask the Lord and the Blessed Virgin to sustain you, so that you may continue on your journey with dedication and hope.

Rome, “A. Gemelli” Hospital, 20 March 2025.

FRANCIS

________________________________________

Holy See Press Office Bulletin, 25 March 2025