The following is the Message sent by the Holy Father to the participants in the Plenary Assembly of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors (24 to 28 March 2025):

Message of the Holy Father

Dear brothers and sisters,

I warmly send you my greetings and some guidance 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, since it advocates for safeguarding: through a formation that educates, measures that prevent, and listening that restores dignity. When you establish prevention policies, even in the remotest communities, you are making a promise: that every child, every vulnerable person, will find a safe environment in the ecclesial community. This is the driving force of what should be for us an integral conversion.

Today, I ask you for three commitments:

1. To cooperate more closely with the Dicasteries of the Roman Curia.

2. To offer hospitality and care for the spiritual wounds of victims and survivors, in the style of the good Samaritan. To listen with the ear of the heart, so that every testimony is not treated as a record to be compiled, but a profound opportunity for mercy and newness of life.

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

In these ten years, you have enabled a safety network to grow within the Church. Keep moving forward! 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 dismiss 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