The Press Room of the Holy See has confirmed John Paul II’s visit to Lourdes on 14 and 15 August 2004. Msgr. Jacques Perrier, bishop of Tarbes and Lourdes, and Archbishop Jean-Pierre Ricard, president of the French Bishops’ Conference, had invited the Pope to go on pilgrimage to Lourdes, on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the promulgation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. John Paul II will thus be making his seventh visit to France, which included a pilgrimage to Lourdes in 1983. His last visit to the country was on the occasion of World Youth Day in Paris in 1997. It’s together with youth that Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, archbishop of Paris, chose to celebrate the 50th anniversary of his ordination as priest. Many young people replied to the cardinal’s invitation, thronging the church of Saint-Severin for an evening of celebration and dialogue. They presented the archbishop with a “golden book” in which throughout the evening they wrote their prayer intentions. “It’s the purest and finest gesture you could make to me and I thank you for it”, said Lustiger. The cardinal (who is now 77 years old and was ordained on 17 April 1954) re-traced the most important stages of his life, but his retrospect was interrupted by the questions of the young. “What do you recall of the circumstance that led to your ordination?”, someone asked him. The cardinal replied by saying that one day, as he was asking himself whether he was worthy to be a priest he had heard a voice that told him: “Fool, it’s I who am calling you”. He was also asked what where the high points of his life. The cardinal recalled the day on which he was told that the Pope had appointed him bishop of Orléans. Another high point was that of World Youth Day in Paris. “I was sure said the cardinal that there would be a positive response” to the event and to the arrival of John Paul II “but everyone thought the opposite, so much so that a few weeks before, the forecasts were speaking of a participation of barely 70,000 youth. I saw, on the contrary, a huge gathering of French youth: a miracle of God that probably changed something for good in France”.
