Pope to Make Pilgrimage to Lourdes in August

Will stay with the ailing and pray for a miracle.



From ABCNEWS.com : Pope to Stay with Ailing on August Lourdes Trip:



"Pope John Paul will stay overnight at a special residence for ailing pilgrims when he visits the French pilgrimage shrine of Lourdes on August 14-15, according to French Catholic officials.



The pope, 84 and stricken by Parkinson's disease, wants to make the pilgrimage like any of the other ailing pilgrims who go to Lourdes hoping for a cure from waters in a grotto where the Virgin Mary is to have appeared in 1858, they said.



The Polish-born pontiff wants to mark the 150th anniversary of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, which states that the mother of Jesus Christ was born free of original sin.



"The pope will come as an ailing person making a pilgrimage to Lourdes ... an ill man among the ill," Bishop Jacques Perrier, head of the local diocese of Tarbes and Lourdes in southwestern France, told journalists this week."