Blessed are the just
On 11 th February 1858, in a small, fairly uninteresting country town in the south-west of France, a young girl gathering firewood was met by a vision of a tiny maiden, in white robe and blue sash. Over weeks and months, this apparition appeared again and again to her, and is now known as the apparition of Our Lady of Lourdes. Now a slightly terrifying ecclesiastical Disney world, Lourdes is nonetheless striking for being a place where those that society has forgotten – the sick, the disabled, those so often hidden away by the modern world – are placed at the fore. Anyone who has been there cannot fail to be moved by the processions before the international mass – led, right at the front, not by the dignitaries of this world, or the high and mighty – not led, even in the heart of France, by a gathering of mayors – led, instead, in a great winding line, by those that Lourdes has, ever since those apparitions, sought to place at the centre – the sick and the disabled. It is ...