Lourdes/Paris - Paradox in Lourdes: too many helpers, too few pilgrims. The demand for support lags behind the supply in the French pilgrimage site. Why organisers are now calling hospitals and homes.
The French pilgrimage site of Lourdes is running out of patients. As the French online portal lavie.fr reported on Friday, the ratio of registered volunteers to the number of sick and elderly people expected in Lourdes does not currently match.
The magazine reports that the number of visitors to Lourdes has returned to pre-corona levels in the past two years. However, significantly more volunteers and hospital staff came forward than would be necessary for the small number of sick people registered. According to the report, volunteers who would like to register as patient bearers have already been on the waiting list for several weeks.
Those responsible are now resorting to special measures: Organisers of an annual pilgrimage from Paris have already started looking for potential pilgrims in church communities, they say. "We have also called many retirement homes to find out whether residents would volunteer," the online portal quotes a member of the tour organiser's medical team as saying. (KNA)