The relics of St Bernadette of Lourdes will arrive at Carfin Grotto on the 24th of September at 11 am. The relics will then stay at the Grotto until the morning of the 1st of October.
Currently at the Bishopric of the Forces’ Cathedral Church of St Michael & St George before resuming a tour across England and Wales, Carfin Grotto is the only planned Scottish destination.
The arrival at Carfin will be marked by a national pilgrimage to the Grotto on Sunday 25th September with Mass celebrated by Bishop Joseph Toal of Motherwell in the presence of the relics.
Bishop Toal said the pilgrimage was also to mark the centenary of Carfin Grotto, with Catholic schools also sending representatives.
“Everything’s coming together very specially that week,” he said.
“We hope you will be richly blessed by being able to be in the presence of St Bernadette’s relics, to be inspired by her life and her wonderful experience of Our Lady’s apparitions to her in the 1850s.”
The relics departed Westminster Cathedral on the 5th of September, where Cardinal Vincent Nichols of the Archdiocese of Westminster declared that ‘Lourdes has come to Westminster’.
“I confess that when spending some quiet time before the Relics, I found it to be so similar to being at the grotto in Lourdes itself,” he said.
“Even though there was a constant flow of people, what struck me was the deep sense of peace.
He said that there was were ‘countless moments in which people’ entrusted themselves ‘to Our Lady at the prompting of St Bernadette’.
Cardinal Nichols previously released a letter imploring Catholics to consider making pilgrimage to Lourdes, an opportunity which ‘has been made difficult or impossible over the last two years’ as a result of the pandemic.
“The pilgrimage St Bernadette’s relics will undertake this Autumn offers us a welcome opportunity to bear active witness to our Faith, joining with one another across our many communities to encounter God’s love and find spiritual, emotional, and psychological healing and renewal,” he said.