Two plane loads of pilgrims from Meath, on their way to Lourdes for the diocesan annual pilgrimage, have been affected by the closure of Futura Gael.The pilgrims are among a group of almost 1,400, led by Bishop Michael Smith, who are in the fortunate position of having their annual pilgrimage during the time of the Pope's visit to Lourdes which begins Friday.
“It is a unique privilege for us to be in Lourdes with Pope Benedict,” Bishop Smith told the Westmeath Examiner.
“The pilgrims bring with them the hopes and prayers, the pains and joys of people of the entire diocese. At the end of the pilgrimage, a large candle will be left burning at the grotto which gathers into one focus of light all our prayers. During these days of pilgrimage, all the people of our diocese, whether at home or in Lourdes, will be part of the great movement of prayer under the protection of Our Lady of Lourdes.”
The Pope is visiting the world’s most famous shrine, to mark the 150th anniversary of the apparitions of our Lady to St Bernadette. He will be in Lourdes from Friday 12th until Monday 15th September.
A hundred pilgrims were due to fly out today, on a Futura Gael flight to Lourdes, and one of four plane loads of Meath pilgrims leaving Friday for the Marian shrine, was also chartered from Futura.
Betty Ryan, owner of Pilgrimages Abroad, in Dublin, confirmed that the pilgrimage plans were hit by the collapse of the company - and her travel company was left with no option but to charter replacements, not just for those two planes, but also for four planes on an Oblates mission to Lourdes later in September.
Ms Ryan told The Westmeath Examiner that her company had paid out on all the airplanes in advance - €400,000. She said it was unlikely they would recoup the money and were paying for the replacement planes from their own funds.
On Sunday, over 3,000 people left from Dublin on the Dublin diocesan pilgrimage, believed to the largest ever such pilgrimage group from the capital.
The next day, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin who leads the Dublin pilgrimage, said that the sick were not just objects of care of the Church. In a homily on the feast of the Birthday of Mary, he said there can be no Church without the sick.
“The authenticity of Church life today must be judged and measured also on how the Church appears as a community in which anyone who is sick and who is troubled and anguished is welcomed with the same compassion, understanding and care as Jesus", said Dr Martin, who is joined by the former Archbishop of Dublin, Cardinal Desmond Connell.
The sick, in their weakness, were the ones who in faith recognised Jesus. “There is a sense in which it is only when we become like the sick that we can enter into the kingdom.”
Archbishop Martin said Mary brought a realisation of how much God loves us and how he can transform us. This message challenges our society.
“Our Irish society in its days of wealth failed to leave as its inheritance a quality of health care that it should have been possible to achieve. Today our economic situation has changed and tough corrective measures and spending cuts are needed. The aim must not be,however, to get back to business as before, to restore a past model of society and economy whose weaknesses are now more clearly to be seen. The task, even amidst the necessary cost-cutting measures, is to create the beginnings of a new model, a new vision of society, the signs of which we can experience here in Lourdes in this experience of solidarity between young and old, sick and healthy, the hopeful and the anxious.”
Meanwhile in his first ever message posted on a social networking site, the Pope has appealed to people to pray for the young people of France. “May we all be rejuvenated in hope!” he wrote on the XT3 site, a Facebook type site established for the World Youth Day in Australia this year.
Each of the 35,000 users of Xt3.com (the letters stand for Christ in the third Millennium) received a personalised version of this message from Pope Benedict earlier this week.
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(Source: CIN)