LOURDES PILGRIMS.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXIII, Issue 4445, 26 July 1922, Page 1

LOURDES PILGRIMS.

360 LEAVE LONDON IN SEARCH OF CURE.

Amid the chanting of hymns a train freighted with high, hopes and simple faith left Victoria Station, London. It was carrying some 360 pilgrims, members of; the annual pilgrimage of the Society of. Our Lady of Lourdes, to the world-famous grotto in tlie little town at the foot of the Pyrenees. It was here on February 11, 1858, that Bernadette Soubirous, a 13-year-old daughter of a miller, having entered ope of the caves, declared she had seen “a woman clothed all in white with, a blue girdle from whicn hung a rosary and surrounded by au unearthly light-,” a- vision which is reported to have occurred eighteen times. A spring is-said to have gushed fortli from tlie spot where the vision first appeared. It is in the water of. this spring that many of ,the pilgrims who recently left London—the halt, the maimed, the almost blind, apd the half-iparalysed—go to seek their cure. From early in the morning the stretchers and roll-chairs began to arrive on the platform, and one aged man was placed, bed and all-, in the train. The ages of tlie pilgrims range from .12 to 80. CRIPPLES WALK AGAIN.' . The pilgrimage has npt been marked by any very noteworthy event. There are some who declare that they have been somewhat eased from pain, but no miraculous action has been reported.

The week before there was a large French pilgrimage numbering 8000 men and women, and “cures>’’ were claimed. A crippled woman walked after being an invalid for nine years, and similarly a crippled boy began to walk again.