Pope's Emotional Visit to Lourdes

PARIS — In the stifling heat of Lourdes, between long pauses to draw breath and formulate his words Pope John Paul II confounded his critics Aug. 14 and consolidated an image as an icon of strength. Besides the contents of the 84-year-old Pope's sermon — which called on Christians to defend life “from its conception until its natural end” — it was his extraordinary physical performance that moved the 200,000 people attending the two-and-a-half-hour long Assumption Day Mass in the Pyrenean shrine. “Viva Il Papa,” shouted the crowd to fill the gaps in the Pope's homily and encourage him to persevere each time his vocal chords tightened and slowed.

At one point during the speech he turned to his private secretary, Msgr. Mieczyclaw Mokrzycki, and asked him in Polish: “Help me.” Vatican journalists said this usually meant the Pope wanted the rest of his homily to be read for him. But this time the Pope added: “I must finish,” and requested a drink of water before continuing in the 86-degree heat.

Many were primed to see the Holy Father's visit to Lourdes—-only his second trip outside Italy this year — as a symbolic farewell on Earth to the Virgin Mary whose hand he said saved his life when a Turkish would-be assassin shot him in May 1981.

“I feel with emotion that I have reached the end of my pilgrimage,” he said at the end of the rosary prayer and was seen to shed tears.

The Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls talked down the significance of the sentence. “The Pope is showing his emotion over this pilgrimage to Lourdes which he has been looking forward to for a long time.”

After a meeting with French bishops, the Pope returned to Bernadette's grotto for a private prayer before leaving for Tarbes airport and his flight to Rome.

The mountain village became a world famous shrine after a 14-year-old girl, Bernadette Soubirous, saw apparitions of the Virgin in a cave-like grotto on Feb. 11, 1858. The apparition proclaimed “I am the Immaculate Conception,” which was taken by the Catholic faithful to confirm the dogma, pronounced four years earlier, affirming that Mary was preserved from original sin at her conception.

Within a few years of the Vatican's acknowledgement of Bernadette's visions, pilgrims began to venture to Lourdes and report miraculous cures from the grotto's water. There have been thousands of cures attributed to Lourdes but to date, the Vatican's stringent standards have acknowledged only 66 as strictly miraculous. Six million pilgrims — many of them sick — travel to the village every year.

The Pope drank Lourdes water earlier in his visit but did not bathe in the waters as those seeking cures often do.

Many of those attending yesterday's outdoor Mass on a lawn in the Sanctuaries area of Lourdes — which includes the cave and three basilicas — were young pilgrims who were often moved to tears by the Pope's performance and were inspired by John Paul II's strength.

“He is someone who pushes himself to the limit,” said Guillaume Langlois, a 25-year-old seminarian. “He inspires young people because he faces up to life as it has been presented to him, and does not give up.”

(Press Association)