Everyday miracles – HCPT in Lourdes

It is 70 years since Dr Michael Strode founded the Hosanna House and Children’s Pilgrimage Trust, better known as HCPT, and began a revolution in the way that disabled people and their family and carers would make pilgrimages to Lourdes.

Our little group of nurses, volunteers, other helpers and around a dozen high-dependency children emerged into the welcome lobby at the airport, to be met by singers and guitarists with a lively rendition of “Jesus Is the Rock and He Rolls My Blues Away”. In spite of the long journey and our lack of sleep, it was impossible not to be uplifted by the palpable sense of joy as we headed in our wheelchair-adapted bus towards the snow-capped Pyrenees shimmering in the distance. 

Every summer more than 1,500 people, many of them with disabilities or life-limiting conditions, enjoy a week at HCPT’s Hosanna House in Bartrès near Lourdes. But the big set piece of HCPT’s year is the annual Easter pilgrimage, when a thousand or so disabled and disadvantaged children and young people enjoy a life-changing pilgrimage holiday in Lourdes, supported by volunteer helpers, nurses and priests. I had signed up a few months earlier to join Group 170 from Southampton, one of more than 100 groups making the trip.

HCPT (the Hosanna House and Children’s Pilgrimage Trust) was founded in 1956 by Michael Strode, a doctor who joined the community of Cistercian monks on Caldey Island, Pembrokeshire, after his retirement. He died in 2019, at the age of 96. He first took a group of children to Lourdes in 1954, insisting that disabled children be accommodated not in austere hospitals but in comfortable hotels, together with those looking after them. On an HCPT pilgrimage the children find themselves at the centre of attention, with the focus on fun, games, play, song and other group activities. During my week with them I saw how they blossomed. When people told Brother Michael what a wonderful thing he had done in founding HCPT, he would simply say: “It wasn’t me. It was God.” Witnessing with my own eyes the everyday miracles that his legacy has inspired made me understand why those who knew and worked with him have been looking into the possibility that one day he might be recognised by the Church as a saint.

The children in our group ranged from a Down syndrome child to a child who could only be fed through a tube into his stomach. Nick Le Prevost, a consultant paediatrician, and Charlie “Chazza” Pugh, a neonatal nurse, delivered tea and vitamins to every room before breakfast. This was just one minor detail in an immensely complex daily logistical exercise in organisation and planning. The volunteers this year included Maria Young, headmistress of Farnborough Hill school in Hampshire, Nelle Carty Dalton, the school chaplain, and several pupils from the lower sixth. 

Our chaplain was Canon Paul James (“PJ”) Smith, Episcopal Vicar for Education in Portsmouth Diocese and chaplain at St Mary’s School, Ascot. His warmth, sense of humour and understanding enabled him to meet the children – and the adults like me sort of pretending for a bit to be children again – precisely where we were. He led us on a little tour in the footsteps of St Bernadette, through narrow, turreted, cobbled streets near the shrine, where the smell of incense mingled with the scent of fresh running water and damp rock, to the cachot, the tiny former jail cell with one fireplace and one sink where the Soubirous family lived for a time when Bernadette’s father’s business went under. At the parish church, PJ gathered the children near the baptismal font and water from Bernadette’s spring was passed around in small cups. We held it in our palms and sang “Jesus is the water of life”. A child in a wheelchair lifted both her hands above her head.

HCPT led the evening torchilight procession to the Grotto in Lourdes, to mark its 70th anniversary

Later, Canon PJ presided at a “talent show” with a microphone decorated with a pink balloon. “The results are very clear! Each and every one of you is a winner!” Every child went home with a gold-star medal. It was both amusing and deeply moving. A ­volunteer, a GP who was with her son as a helper, and who has been coming for 13 years, explained that her role was to do all the ­personal care and feeding for one of the children. She said: “I just happen to be a doctor. I’m not using my medical skills. Just my mummy skills.”

There were several bishops and archbishops among us, happily serving as humble chaplains to groups from their diocese. Archbishop Mark O’Toole of Cardiff told me he had come to Lourdes for the first time with HCPT as a 17-year-old sixth-former, starting to wonder about the priesthood but not yet having done anything about it. “It really kind of blew my mind,” he told me. “I realised that I was encountering the Jesus Christ I was reading about in the Gospels, in a living way, through my encounter with the children, the family groups and those who accompany them, the helpers. I discovered a network of young people who were on fire with their love of God, I saw their desire to know Jesus Christ more, their desire to serve.” He has been back a dozen or so times since, as helper, group leader, seminary student, young priest, bishop, and now as archbishop.

The pilgrims included George Gelder, aged 79. He had contracted polio in 1947 at the age of two and was sent to a series of institutions around the country, eventually coming to Chailey Heritage School in Sussex, where Michael Strode served as the resident medical officer. George was in one of the first HCPT groups. Still in a wheelchair, he was with his wife Ann. They have five children. “Michael brought me out here,” he told me. “He said it would be ‘a holiday with Our Lady’, but I felt it was something completely different.” George used to suffer panic attacks. “It was really bad. People used to say I had a screw loose.” One year, he went in the baths out of respect for Strode. Something remarkable happened. “I couldn’t breathe, it was that cold. I went back to the hotel, flushed the Diazepam down the loo and have never had another panic attack.”

Nearly a third of the volunteers were aged under 25 but could hardly be described as part of the so-called “Quiet Revival”. There were moments of silent prayer at the grotto and in the night-time torchlight processions, but with all the singing, cheering, clapping and laughing, there was little that was quiet about our HCPT pilgrimage. I could see the older volunteers, priests and bishops regarding these smart, faithful, joyful youngsters in some amazement, wondering if they might not be looking at the Church of the future.

HCPT is funded by a combination of donations, legacies, fundraising events and grants. Claire Quigley recently joined as fundraising and communications director from the financial education charity Money Ready, where she led the team that had more than doubled fundraising income. Chief executive Tricia Macfarlane previously ran the Scottish fund management charity Impact Funding Partners. She was working from home in Glasgow when, browsing the internet, she came across an advertisement headed “Lourdes charity seeks new chief executive.” She told me: “I genuinely feel I was called. Some days I still question it, because some days it’s hard. And I say to Our Lady: ‘Is it still me you want?’ And, so far, she says: ‘Yes, Tricia, just go with it.’”

Macfarlane’s three priorities are financial discipline (“You don’t get to the impact if you can’t control expenditure”), growth and mission expansion. “People still describe HCPT as ‘the Catholic Church’s best-kept secret’,” she says. She would like to see young people trained as community ambassadors, speaking in schools and youth groups and sports clubs, co-designing the future of the organisation alongside the young people it serves. She wants HCPT to be one of the sharpest tools in the toolbox of the new evangelisation, working with the bishops’ conferences both of England and Wales and of Scotland.

On our last morning, I went to the grotto with the group for the last time. People were filing silently past: old men in wheelchairs, French families, Korean nuns, a group of pilgrims from the Caribbean, as well as teenagers in HCPT T-shirts. Before we left, we stopped before the Crowned Virgin statue. The story goes, PJ told me, that if you say three Hail Marys here, you will return to Lourdes one day. I didn’t need to be told twice.

For more information about how to travel to Lourdes with HCPT or how to support its work go to hcpt.org.uk.