Three weddings and a pilgrimage

Chai Brady speaks to couples who met in Lourdes in 2010 and married one month apart

Lourdes is a well-known place of pilgrimage closely connected to faith, prayer and helps people gain a closer connection with God, but if three married couples are anything to go by, it can also be a place to meet a potential soul-mate.

This year was a special summer for six people who met their wives and husbands at the holy site when they were young volunteers assisting elderly pilgrims and developing their own Faith.

During the Diocese of Down and Connor’s annual pilgrimage to Lourdes, six youth volunteers met the love of their lives, although for some it was only years later that sparks began to fly.

All from Northern Ireland, Niamh and Patrick Gallagher married in June, Patrick and Cloína Muldoon in July and Gerard Casey and Aoife Magee in August this year.

Experience

For Gerry Casey, going to Lourdes was quite the tradition for young people in the diocese, and there was a gang of young people attending each year from his school: Rathemore Grammar School in Belfast, which both Patrick and he attended. Their wives are from all over Down and Connor diocese, with Niamh being from Randalstown, Cloína from the southernmost point of the diocese in Kilkeel, and Aoife from Downpatrick.

“There was a whole load of people going from our school. It was basically a bit of a group thing, there was a decent chunk of people. There was a big history of people going. There was a strong awareness of what it was, so quite a lot of us started at exactly the same time,” he said.

The pilgrims are there for all sorts of reasons as well and there’s people who are very seriously ill and people who are just there for a bit of a break”

Mr Casey’s experience of Lourdes was positive as there was a host of people from different backgrounds who all had their own reasons for going.

“It’s pretty diverse to be fair, lots of people there for different reasons. Everybody from the most pious diligent Catholic, to the person that’s there because their friends were going to have some fun – quite an eclectic mix of people. Down and Connor is a decent size of area, so there was people from all the way up the north Antrim coast and then a load of us from the Belfast area,” he said.

Although Mr Casey says it’s a “light-hearted place a lot of the time”, they still had to “work hard”.

He says: “There is plenty of pretty profound sadness in reality for a lot of people, it’s a mixed bag for everybody every year because you never know who you’re going to be looking after. You could be looking after someone in their 60s who’s not quite fit to walk every single day, but needs the odd hand from you in the afternoon for the walk down, all the way to somebody who’s in a pretty critical condition who’s not really in good shape at all and is on their last legs.

“It’s a pretty interesting experience, it was very fulfilling. A pilgrim, one year, died very shortly after, you do have some quite strong memories.

“The pilgrims are there for all sorts of reasons as well and there’s people who are very seriously ill and people who are just there for a bit of a break, a bit of a time for reflection.”

It was in 2009 that he first met his now wife, Aoife, although they did not immediately start going out, a year and half later and some more Lourdes pilgrimages and it wasn’t long before their relationship became romantic.

“I had no agenda. I never would have had any expectations, I never thought that far ahead. Truthfully it’s just kind of happened in a very organic unintended way,” said Mr Casey.

Although he admits he didn’t think too much of the coincidence of his two friends meeting their wives in Lourdes and then having weddings in the same summer one month apart, despite all of them having very different styles of relationships, he says it is “remarkable”.

“We don’t think about it too much but I suppose now especially when we all got married. It’s a joke, Aoife and I were going out for by far the longest, about nine years. We’ve travelled a lot, we’ve lived in Brussels, I was in the States for a while, we’ve never been properly settled so that in part explains why we got married in August, so we were a long burn.

I had no agenda. I never would have had any expectations, I never thought that far ahead…”

“Paddy Muldoon, he’s only really back in Belfast a couple of years, so he was going out with Cloína a decent chunk of time but not as long as us, he was engaged for quite a while, for well over a year anyway, and on the opposite side of the coin, Paddy Gallagher and Niamh were – relatively speaking – pretty short and quick.

“So it’s kind of funny they’re all very different in their own ways, it’s all happened at the same but there was certainly – even a year and a half before – there was no signal that that was going to happen, it was kind of completely organically by chance that we all came to the same sort of crossroads at similar times. It’s quite remarkable.”

Speaking to The Irish Catholic, Patrick Gallagher said he went to Lourdes three years in a row, 2009, 2010 and 2011, and met Niamh there in 2010.

“I only met Niamh in Lourdes in 2010 and we didn’t start going out until 2017. We’d bump into each other at different points and then we met each other again at a prayer group and that’s when we started going out,” he said.

The prayer group was born out of a conference held in Croke Park in 2017 which Niamh hadn’t attended, but was invited to the prayer group by a friend, and the two ended up meeting once again.

He went to Lourdes with a group of five friends, with Mr Gallagher saying himself and the two other married men are “very good friends”, so “three out of the five of us got married in the same summer”.

Speaking about pilgrimages to Lourdes, he added: “It’s a good balance, you’ve got the pilgrimage side of things, the deepening of your faith, and then also the practical side of helping elderly people, it’s definitely a good environment to meet likeminded people and it’s good fun as well.”

There may have been something in the water in Lourdes, but for this summer’s happily married former youth volunteers, they certainly couldn’t complain.