LOURDES, FRANCE — When Pope Benedict XVI visits this small town in the foothills of the French Pyrenees next weekend, he will follow in the footsteps of millions of pilgrims who have come before him.
Like them, he will take Communion, drink from the holy spring and touch the stone at the base of a cliff by the Gave River, where heaven opened to a 14-year-old girl, known as Bernadette, who said she first saw the Virgin Mary there on Feb. 11, 1858. The pope will celebrate the 150th anniversary of St. Bernadette's apparitions, with a pilgrim's heart full of yearning for transformation.
Six million people visit Lourdes every year, including 100,000 volunteers and 80,000 ill and disabled pilgrims seeking cures for their afflictions or the strength to endure them. Since 1858, about 6,800 people have reported being cured at St. Bernadette's grotto, though the Roman Catholic Church has proclaimed only 67 of these to be miracles and hasn't recorded the number of spiritual healings said to have occurred at Lourdes.
Other people come just to witness the sociological phenomenon that daily unfolds; some are cynical or mystified or simply curious, in the way of travelers drawn to other holy sites around the world.
But to visit Lourdes as a tourist is a very different thing from coming here as a pilgrim, as I discovered last month when I joined a group of devout Roman Catholics from Italy for a two-day trip here organized by the Rome-based Opera Romana Pellegrinaggi.
ORP tours, aimed at taking pilgrims to holy places with spiritual guidance, are sold in North America by Toronto-based Christian World Tours, although I booked my trip from Rome. The tour was conducted in Italian by a priest and guide and included round-trip air, lodging, meals and such activities as walking the Lourdes Jubilee Way and taking part in the sanctuary's candlelight procession.
As an American Protestant still struggling with her faith, not to mention her Italian, I knew I would face special challenges. But I speak French, which helped me in Lourdes, and, as a traveler, I look for transformation wherever I can find it.
Besides, ignorance is no hindrance at Lourdes. Bernadette Soubirous, a poor miller's daughter, could neither read nor write when she went to gather firewood by a hill called Massabielle just outside town. Abbe Francois Trochu, her principal biographer, reported what happened next, in her words:
