The
Catholic Weekly
Online
Sydney
19 October 2003
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Peace
in our hands
Jubilee
week for Pope
Special
guests at Mother Teresa’s beatification
School
insurance hike
Honoured
by university
It’s
truly feminine and truly beautiful
Spiritually
renewed by Lourdes
$1.75m
for Caritas
Catholic
Women’s Network
Board
short bonanza for Vinnies
Advice
to lectors, acolytes
Much
deeper reality
Editorial:
Time for tribute
Letters:
Barrel of a gun
Conversation:
Terry Hanley, lay missionary who has spent nearly 15 years in the field - Happy
to ‘spend rest of my life in Africa’
What
is peace like?
Religion
test upsurge
Malouf
on campus
Ministry
of Jesus to the sick and dying
‘Father,
this is your life’
‘Priest
in residence’ honoured
Bushland
setting for Thurgoona church
Full-on
disciple of Jesus
Active
practice of faith
Requiem
Mass for ‘Bacon Priest’
Spiritually renewed by Lourdes
By Chris Lindsay
No miracle took place on the Susan Gunderson pilgrimage to Lourdes, although she is walking better than before, but all participants have come back spiritually renewed and knowing their faith much better.
“I guess miracles happen in God’s time and perhaps he wants to make sure that interior conversion happens before he grants a miracle,” said Nicole King who helped organise, but did not go on, the trip.
However, the pilgrimage was not without its incidents. Marist Fr Michael Rego, who suffers from a debilitating wasting condition in the muscles of the legs, feet, arms and hands for which there is no treatment, twisted his foot in a pothole and fractured his ankle in two places on the way to Brisbane airport to catch the flight to Paris.
Fr Rego arrived hobbling at the airport and limped along for eight days before an x-ray in Lourdes of his foot revealed it to be broken.
Thus the pilgrimage left with two people in wheelchairs and returned with three.
In Lourdes, Susan (who had suffered a cerebral haemorrhage) bathed in the grotto water twice a day.
Susan and her husband Steven came back with “a new awareness of the value of suffering when united with the suffering of our Saviour, Jesus Christ”, as one of the pilgrims said.
During the pilgrimage the benefactors and their families were remembered in Masses and prayers.
The Gundersons and other members of the pilgrimage hope to return to Lourdes next year for a longer period. The balance of the money raised for the Susan Gunderson Appeal will go towards that return pilgrimage.