NEWS STORY: Pope to Visit French Shrine of Lourdes on 104th Trip Outside Italy

c. 2004 Religion News Service VATICAN CITY _ A frail and wheelchair-bound Pope John Paul II will travel to the shrine of Lourdes in the Pyrenees of southwest France on Saturday (Aug. 14) as “a pilgrim among pilgrims,” weak in body but strong in devotion to the Virgin Mary. The purpose of the pope’s two-day […]

c. 2004 Religion News Service

VATICAN CITY _ A frail and wheelchair-bound Pope John Paul II will travel to the shrine of Lourdes in the Pyrenees of southwest France on Saturday (Aug. 14) as “a pilgrim among pilgrims,” weak in body but strong in devotion to the Virgin Mary.

The purpose of the pope’s two-day visit to the most important of shrines dedicated to the Virgin is to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Pope Pius IX’s proclamation of the Immaculate Conception, the dogma that holds that Christ’s mother was born without the stain of original sin.


The high point will come on Sunday when John Paul will preside over a Mass in a meadow beside the River Gave to mark the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, which is closely related to the Immaculate Conception. It is a doctrine of Catholic faith that because of her Immaculate Conception, Mary was assumed body and soul into heaven when she ended her earthly life.

Speaking Wednesday at his weekly general audience in his summer residence at Castelgandolfo, south of Rome, the pope said that he considered his visit to Lourdes to celebrate “the two great Marian mysteries” to be “a special gift of Providence.”

Some 400,000 pilgrims are expected to travel to Lourdes, thousands of them in special “white trains” for the sick and disabled, to attend the papal celebrations.

Representatives of Protestant and Orthodox churches, who normally are invited to papal Masses are unlikely to be among them because they do not share the dogma of the Immaculate Conception.

The Protestant federation said in a statement that members had not been invited “and that is a good thing” because its churches join neither in”the Marian piety nor in a Christianity subjugated to the authority of the pope.”The federation said, however, it hoped the pope would be “happy and a carrier of hope” on the trip.

Lourdes became central to belief in the Immaculate Conception after visions of the Virgin appeared there to a 14-year-old peasant girl, Bernadette Soubirous, in 1858. In 18 apparitions, the girl said, Mary described herself as the Immaculate Conception, ordered that a church be built and told her to drink from the healing waters of a spring at the Massabielle cave.

Plaques testifying to miraculous recoveries attributed to the waters and to prayer to the Madonna line the walls of the churches and chapels of Lourdes, but the church has certified only 66 of them as true miracles, the latest in 1999.


Like many of the 6 million pilgrims who visit Lourdes each year, the 84-year-old Roman Catholic pontiff too will drink the spring water. He also will join in praying the rosary, watch a traditional torchlight procession and spend the night in the Accueil Notre Dame, a 290-room residence for the sick equipped with 904 hospital beds and oxygen in each room.

“The pope will be a pilgrim among pilgrims, a sick person among the sick,” Archbishop Renato Boccardo, organizer of papal trips, said.

The trip will be the 104th that John Paul has made outside Italy in the almost 26 years of his pontificate, his seventh to France and his second to Lourdes. He first visited the shrine on the Feast of the Assumption in 1983.

French President Jacques Chirac will welcome the pope at the Taubes Airport, a half-hour drive from Lourdes. Chirac and John Paul were allied in their opposition to war in Iraq, but the French leader opposed John Paul’s abortive efforts to write a specific reference to Europe’s Christian roots into the preamble of the new European Union constitution.

Security for the papal visit will as massive as it was for the 60th anniversary of the D-Day landing at Normandy in June.

French authorities have declared a 12.5-mile (20-kilometer) “no-fly zone” backed up by Mirage jet fighters and Crotol ground-to-air missiles. A force of 2,700 police and gendarmes will be deployed over a 31-mile (50-kilometer) area while 300 agents will guard Taubes Airport and special units will stand by in Lourdes in case of a nuclear or biological attack.


The administration of the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes reported on its Internet Web site that the cost of the papal visit would total an estimated 1.5 million euros ($1.83 million), including extra first aid and other health services for the pilgrims.

Using an approach that proved successful on the pope’s visit to Switzerland in June, the officials appealed to pilgrims to help meet expenses by putting donations of at least 10 euros ($12.20) in collection boxes near the Massabielle cave and churches.

DEA/JL END POLK

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