Pope Struggles Through Mass at Lourdes Shrine
Pope John Paul II struggled through Mass at a French shrine, gasping, trembling and asking aides for help during the 2 1/2-hour service in sizzling heat.
More than 300,000 pilgrims packed a field overlooking the Lourdes grotto in the Pyrenees, where a peasant girl said in 1858 that she had visions of a white-clad Virgin Mary.
Many pilgrims to Lourdes are sick, handicapped or aged. In wheelchairs lined up on the grass, they listened as the frail pope spoke out against materialism, secularism, abortion, cloning and euthanasia.
“Do everything in your power to ensure that life, each and every life, will be respected from conception to its natural end,” he said.
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