Bro. Michael Strode The founder of a pioneering pilgrimage to Lourdes for people living with disabilities has died.
Bro. Michael Strode died on December 27. He was 96.
Dr Michael Strode, or Bro. Michael as he was called after he became a Cistercian monk in later life, was born in Surrey in 1923 and trained to be a doctor qualifying in 1946. A year earlier, he had been received into the Catholic Church.
He made his first pilgrimage to Lourdes in 1951, and in 1954 he and his friend Peter Keevney took a group of disabled children to Lourdes.
Community
In 1956 the Handicapped Children’s Pilgrimage Trust (HCPT) was founded and the first trust pilgrimage took place in 1957.
Expansion continued in England, and in 1971 the first Irish group joined the Pilgrimage’s Trust.
In October 1991 Michael entered a Cistercian community as an Oblate.
So far, thousands of children and their families have benefited from the work of the trust in Ireland.