Lourdes, a town of 13,400 inhabitants, is one of Europe’s best-known pilgrimage sites. Pope Leo XIV is continuing his visit to France on Sunday in the Marian pilgrimage site of Lourdes, where a service with several tens of thousands of participants is planned. The head of the Catholic Church also intends to speak with people who were victims of sexual abuse by clergy. The French Church has also been shaken by abuse allegations in recent years.
Lourdes, a town of 13,400 inhabitants, is one of Europe’s best-known pilgrimage sites. According to Catholic belief, the Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus Christ, is said to have appeared there several times to a 14-year-old girl in the mid-19th century. Mr Leo plans to remain in France until Monday. The final stop of his four-day trip is the city of Metz, in the east of the country and close to the Franco-German border, where the U.S.-born pontiff plans to deliver a speech on Europe.
At the start of his trip, he visited the capital, Paris, where he celebrated Mass with a congregation of 800,000 on Saturday. France has maintained a strict separation of Church and state for more than a century, with the exception of some regions in the east of the country for historical reasons. Catholics remain the largest religious group in France, but many people in the country no longer identify with any religion.
The proportion of Muslims in the country of 69 million has grown in recent years. We have recently deactivated our website's comment provider in favour of other channels of distribution and commentary. We encourage you to join the conversation on our stories via our Facebook, Twitter and other social media pages. The federal government has urged stakeholders in the agriculture and finance sectors in the West Africa region to leverage financing strategies to enhance agroecology practices “Katsina State is Atiku’s political base because it is his second home.”
Mr Maiwada said that the meeting was to finalise a Customs Mutual Administrative Assistance Agreement (CMAA). Mr Hamzat is the Lagos State governorship candidate of the APC for the 2027 elections. According to Mr Gashinbaki, the study identified 111 validated building collapse incidents in Nigeria between 2015 and 2025. The group condemned the deadly attack on a mining site. World Tourism Day is celebrated annually on September 27.
The coordinator said that the ministry shortlisted 12,000 farmers for the dry season rice and wheat cultivation programme.
