The retiring bishop of Lourdes announced last month that the baths in Lourdes in south western France are to be moved from the crowded building beside the grotto, to a field across the river from the apparition site known as the prairie.
According to Mgr Jacques Perrier, this will improve the conditions for pilgrims and allow a greater number to go through the baths.
The new baths will cost €4 million and are due to be ready in 2014.
The retiring bishop of Tarbes and Lourdes first announced the project, which has been in the pipeline since 2008, on the 150th anniversary of our Lady’s apparition to St Bernadette in 2008.
He said the waiting area at the current site is not suitable.
“It is difficult, not conducive to discretion or meditation or the journey of faith,” he said.
Asked if there had been complaints about the current baths, Mgr Perrier said that not everyone wanted to bathe in the pool, but what he was most concerned about was a return to Our Lady’s message to St Bernadette.
“The Virgin didn’t ask people to bathe, but just drink the water and wash at the source that appeared at this place. Today it is not possible to perform these actions in a single location.”
He said the new arrangement “should enable a satisfactory solution.”
Currently around 400,000 pilgrims (less than 10 per cent of the visitors to the shrine) take the bath in the pool.
The new baths, which will be built where Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI celebrated masses during their visits, will have several basins so that pilgrims can opt to drink the water and wash their hands and faces or choose to be completely immersed in the water.
Five architectural practises are submitting drawings for the building.
A final choice will be made at the end of April.
Meanwhile, on February 11, the feast day of Our Lady of Lourdes, Mgr Nicolas Brouwet, currently of Nanterre, was named as the new bishop Tarbes and Lourdes.
He will be installed as the bishop at a ceremony at the diocesan Cathedral in the town of Lourdes on March25.
Lourdes attracts more than six million pilgrims each year, with pilgrims from Ireland being fifth in number after France and Italy.
400,000 take the traditional bath.
Of these, an estimated 100,000 are sick or infirm.