Until last week, I had never been to Lourdes, which is an admission, I suppose, on a par with Fintan O'Toole letting it be known that he had only recently got around to reading that fella Marx.
It wasn’t that I had anything against Lourdes. For decades, I had encouraged students from the school where I teach to volunteer as helpers with the Dublin Diocesan Pilgrimage. I knew for many of them it was a wonderful experience. However, most of my support was of the “Aren’t ye all marvellous” variety, rather than any burning desire to get involved or go myself. But late in the last school year I was asked if I would accompany six students. Some 21 schools send students each year to accompany sick pilgrims.
Archbishop John Charles McQuaid instituted the pilgrimage in 1949, and asked some members of the first committee to find some young people to help to carry the sick. At that time the journey to Lourdes involved trains and boats, and people lying patiently in rows on stretchers, waiting to be transported. Belvedere College was the first school to respond to the call for helpers, and has been doing so since, so the preparatory meetings are held there.
Every school does it differently but in our school the tradition is that the entire fifth year raises funds for the fares and to bring sick pilgrims and, while there is immense competition for the six places, most of those who help raise the money know they will not get to Lourdes.
Some of my best fundraisers had not even applied to go, but did everything from running coffee mornings to cheerfully pedalling around Phoenix Park in the pelting rain on a sponsored cycle.
People regularly talk about how passive and apathetic young people are. They rarely talk about how, for example, so many charities in this country would fall apart without the fundraising done by transition- year students alone.
The preparatory meetings for teachers and students were a revelation. I realised I had been looking through a very narrow chink in the curtain and there was a vast panorama I had no idea existed.
Small army of volunteers
Running the pilgrimage requires a small army, virtually all volunteers. Two thousand pilgrims travel from Dublin, of whom about 170 are ill (known as very important pilgrims, or VIPs) who stay in the Accueil, which is somewhere between a hotel and a hospital.
Some 560 volunteers accompany them at their own expense. I learned a new vocabulary. Blueshirts are not fascists, for example, but the students from the schools, and there are about 130 of them, accompanied by about 30 teachers and chaplains.
Then there are the whiteshirts, who must be Ireland’s best kept secret. They are over 18, mostly in their early 20s. Dozens give up a week of their holidays. They raise their fares, pay for their accommodation and make their own way to Lourdes.
They spend hours every day chatting to, looking after, and helping to transport sick pilgrims. They and the blueshirts push the wheelchairs and pull the famous blue voitures, which are akin to sturdy rickshaws, but which one VIP with a twinkle insisted on calling her buggy.
Repeatedly I found a lump in my throat watching the young people relate to elderly and sick pilgrims. Mind you, some of the whiteshirts also party hard when they clock off, in the usual Irish fashion.
And I haven’t even started on the older helpers, again all unpaid. There are nurses, doctors (some specialists, some GPs who have to pay for a locum) speech and language therapists, priests and people from every walk of life who just come to help. Between whiteshirts and other volunteers I met about 20 past pupils from my school alone. There are also redshirts, who work for Crosscare and care for the sick people who stay in hotels rather than in the Accueil.
Sadness
There is sadness, too. Each potential pilgrim is assessed for fitness to travel by a nurse, again working as a volunteer, but some are very ill. It is often mentioned that for some of the pilgrims this will be their final time in Lourdes.
The shrine itself really touched me, which again surprised me. Sure, the streets outside the domain, as the area surrounding the grotto is known, are crassly commercialised, with industrial quantities of the tackiest possible religious souvenirs on sale.
But inside the domain there is a intensely spiritual atmosphere, even when you are not taking part in a procession with several thousands of people after dark, each holding a votive candle.
The liturgies are beautiful, with soaring music and an immense sense of the power of ritual. Although the days begin at 6.30am and never end before midnight you find yourself carried along, just grateful to be part of this hidden, unfashionable and deeply moving pilgrimage. It’s so much more about service than about miracles, or perhaps about the miracles service can bring about.