Religion: Hospital for Souls

Down the Rue de la Grotte one morning last week marched eight little boys, hand in hand, wide-eyed and solemn. They were leading the greatest procession ever held at Lourdes, one of Christendom's most famed places of pilgrimage.

Behind them came a hundred rows of other children, followed by a vast crowd of men and women. Many had walked that morning through mountain wind and pelting rain as a special act of devotion to the Virgin Mary on the 100th anniversary of her apparition to little Bernadette Soubirous in the grotto at Lourdes. By...

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