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Before dozens of rows of wheelchair-bound believers, Pope Benedict XVI on Monday celebrated a special mass for the sick at the French shrine town of Lourdes.
  
One of the world's most revered Roman Catholic sites, the southwestern town at the foothills of the Pyrenees draws many ill and disabled pilgrims in search of a miracle cure.
  
Tens of thousands of faithful, many bundled in blankets on stretchers, in wheelchairs or leaning on canes attended the open-air mass in front Lourdes' Basilica of the Rosary, on the final day of the pope's visit to France.
  
Ten pilgrims received the annointing of the sick from the pope who said faith provided strength to cope with failing health.
  
"The endurance of suffering can upset life's most stable equilibrium, it can shake the firmest foundations of confidence, and sometimes even leads people to despair of the meaning and value of life," he said.
  
"There are struggles that we cannot sustain alone, without the help of divine grace."
  
After visiting Paris, Benedict travelled to Lourdes to mark the 150th anniversary of what Catholics believe were apparitions of the Virgin Mary to French peasant girl Bernadette Soubirous.
  
The 81-year-old pontiff completed his pilgrimage on Monday, visiting a hospital chapel where Bernadette received the sacrament of first communion.
  
"The smile of Mary is for all," the pope told the faithful. "But it is directed quite particularly to those who suffer, so that they can find comfort and solace therein."
  
During one of her 18 apparitions to Bernadette in 1858, Mary is said to have revealed a spring of miraculous powers and asked her to drink from it.
  
The site has since drawn millions of pilgrims who fill bottles with the "miracle" water from the grotto, and the ill and infirm can bathe in one of the nearby 17 fresh water pools.
  
Suffering from bowel cancer, 54-year-old Mary Feeney traveled from Ireland to attend the special services.
  
"This means a lot to me and I hope it will help my recovery," said Feeney. "There is a real sense of holiness and peace to this place."
  
Philippe de Cuverville from Paris brought his 14-year-old disabled daughter to attend the mass.
  
"I believe in miracles but I didn't come to Lourdes for a miracle," he said. "We come together as people with difficulties and this is comforting."
  
Thousands of "miracle" cures have been attributed to Lourdes but the Catholic Church has only certified 67.
  
The leader of the world's one billion Catholics began his pilgrimage on Saturday, kneeling in prayer at the grotto and drinking a glass of water presented to him by a young girl.
  
Benedict is making his first visit to France since his election in 2005.
  
On Sunday he celebrated mass before 150,000 faithful in Lourdes and urged French bishops to defend church doctrine on marriage and divorce.
  
The papal visit comes at a time of unease in the French Catholic Church as it battles a freefall in the number of churchgoers, despite the nation's deep Christian heritage.
  
While Catholicism remains by far the number one religion in France, only 10 percent of Catholics say they attend mass regularly, according to a recent poll.
  
The pontiff said Sunday the church will not open up to divorced Catholics and appealed to bishops to "uphold firmly, even at the cost of opposing prevailing trends", marriage as a "stable union" between a man and a woman.
  
The pope arrived in Paris on Friday, meeting with President Nicolas Sarkozy, who has called for easing France's strict secularism defined in a 1905 law on the separation of church and state.
  
Sarkozy, a twice-divorced lapsed Catholic, broke a French taboo during a trip to the Vatican last year by calling for a "positive secularism" that would allow space for religion in public life.