FRANCE: The Pontiff is visiting the shrine at Lourdes as 'a sick man among sick people', writes Lara Marlowe in Paris
When Mgr Jacques Perrier, the bishop of Tarbes and Lourdes, invited Pope John Paul II to visit the Marian city of Lourdes last winter, the bishop promised the Pontiff "a moment of tranquillity and solitude near the grotto where the Virgin came to tell Bernadette Soubirous: 'I am the Immaculate Conception'."
The Pope announced in June that he had accepted the invitation because it was "a personal wish" to return to the shrine as "a sick man among sick people".
Eighty thousand of the six million annual visitors to Lourdes are ill or handicapped.
It is John Paul II's eighth visit to France; his first since 1997.
The high point of the visit is meant to be the 1½ hours tomorrow afternoon during which the Pope will pray in front of the grotto where Mary is said to have appeared 18 times before Bernadette Soubirous in 1858.
The Virgin allegedly spoke in the local Bigourdan dialect to Sousbirous, a 14-year-old stricken with tuberculosis.
It will hardly be the "moment of tranquillity and solitude" promised by Mgr Perrier. One thousand reporters, photographers and television cameramen have been accredited, and images of the Pontiff praying will be re-transmitted on giant screens. Those who want to attend the Pope's Mass at 10 a.m. tomorrow have been advised to enter the Park of the Sanctuaries of the Apparitions during the night.
The papal visit marks the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin and the 150th anniversary of Pope Pius IX's doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, according to which Mary was the only human being unstained by original sin at the time of her conception.
A sign at the entry to the park forbids ice cream and mobile telephones and warns that pickpockets often strike when believers lean to fill bottles or jerrycans at taps. Any aircraft that ventures within 20km of the Pope will be shot down by Crotale missiles, attack helicopters or jet fighters.
John Paul II recently wrote that he wanted to visit Lourdes because it was there that "the Virgin wanted to show in a very special way her maternal love for people who suffer and are ill."
As a precaution, the 84-year-old Pope's medical files have been forwarded to the nearby Bigorre medical centre, and a helicopter will stand by to take him there if need be.
Most visitors to Lourdes are foreign, including a surprising number of Muslims and Hindus. French citizens nonetheless benefited from 55 of the 66 miracles which the church recognises at Lourdes since 1858. The last was certified in 1999, 12 years after a male nurse called Jean-Pierre Bély was cured of the multiple sclerosis that had crippled him, days after visiting Lourdes.
The archbishopric employs a Catholic doctor called Patrick Theillier as Medical Director of the Sanctuaries. Dr Theillier examines daily two or three people who claim to have been cured. Most, he told Libération newspaper, are the victims of self-delusion.
The Lourdes International Medical Committee considers cases that Dr Theillier finds convincing, then forwards one in 10 to a canonical commission.
