Phillip Pulaski.

Phillip Pulaski is a physician at Boston Healthcare for the Homeless and a member of the board of the Albert Schweitzer Fellowship.

I've just returned from my third trip to Lourdes, where I serve as a physician accompanying the American Knights of Malta on their annual pilgrimage. Lourdes is the most important healing shrine in the world, attracting more than 5 million pilgrims a year. Wherein lies its appeal? In the readable and scholarly Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age (Penguin, $17, 474 pp.), Ruth Harris, a secular Jewish historian at Oxford, provides some answers. Harris begins by placing Bernadette's encounter with the Virgin Mary (there were a total of eighteen apparitions in the winter and spring of 1858) within the wider context of centuries of Marian veneration among the poor inhabitants of the Pyrenees in southern France.

While Bernadette joined a religious order and drifted into obscurity, the apparitions inspired the religious imagination of both the rural poor and educated urban Catholics, who proclaimed their faith, often in open defiance of secular authority. The lure of the supernatural, the encounter with the divine, came face to face with rationalism, positivism, and the glorified world of the secular. By 1870-71, France faced cataclysm, losing the Franco-Prussian war and then undergoing civil war in Paris. But in Lourdes, a different story emerged. Women (both poor and members of the aristocracy), under the guidance of the Assumptionists, provided hands-on care for the sick and dying. Intense spiritual bonds formed. Harris eloquently demonstrates how the rites and rituals of Lourdes (pilgrimage, eucharistic processions, bathing the sick in miraculous waters) became at once a means of honoring God's redemptive presence in the world of suffering, and, at the same time, reflective of an underlying ideology which sought to restore the Catholic church's influence in society by backing a besieged Vatican and working for a re-Christianized France. Most troubling in this story are the vicious anti-Semitic and profascist groups that co-opted Lourdes as far forward as World War II.

The miraculous apparitions at Lourdes inspired many twentieth-century Catholics, most noteworthy, perhaps, the heroic English couple, Leonard Cheshire and Sue Ryder, subjects of two outstanding books. Cheshire and Ryder made annual pilgrimages to Lourdes and a Sue Ryder Maison de Marie Hotel is now run by Katy Fitzsimmons, Ryder's close friend and collaborator. Richard Morris's Cheshire: The Biography of Leonard Cheshire VC, OM (Viking, $20, 530 pp.) tells the story of Group Captain Leonard Cheshire, one of Britain's greatest World War II aviators, and in the postwar period, one of her greatest saints. Cheshire completed 100 bombing runs over Nazi Germany during the war; his 101st mission was as an observer of the bombing of Nagasaki. After the war, profoundly affected by what he had witnessed, Cheshire went from fame and fortune to a joyless life and an involuntary discharge from the military (due to "psychoneurosis"). He yearned for a world that worked for peace.

Cheshire's vocation came to him as he cared for a friend dying of cancer. He converted to Catholicism on Christmas Eve, 1948. His life's work was, in his words, "to take those that are unwanted, and to make them wanted. Not to say to them: 'Now just lie back and be comfortably sick for the rest of your life'; but to give them a purpose to live for, to give them the means of rising above their infirmity, to turn them into active members of the family, active helpers in the work that still has so far to go, so many countries to reach." He dedicated himself to an international movement to ameliorate third-world suffering. By the time of his death in 1992, Cheshire was considered one of Britain's greatest humanitarian figures. His legacy: 270 homes for the disabled in forty countries. Nehru described him as the greatest man he had met since Gandhi.

Sue Ryder's autobiography, Child of My Love (Harvill, $32, 656 pp.) is an epic of the twentieth century. Ryder chronicles that period by telling stories of many unpublicized individuals who exhibited extraordinary courage, sacrifice, and suffering while defending human freedom. Sue Ryder's mother, Mabel, had worked on behalf of the poor in rural England during the Great Depression. When World War II broke out, Sue, age seventeen, also sought to serve. She enrolled in the Special Operations Executive, a clandestine branch responsible for training resistance fighters in occupied Europe. Ryder was assigned to the Polish section and witnessed, firsthand, terrible suffering but also "courage and selflessness, hope and generosity, humor and warmth."

After the war, Ryder set up a foundation to honor those who had given their lives. Her mantra: "I have always been surprised by the number of well-meaning people with a genuine desire to help who have looked at the enormity facing humanity and said, 'The problem is too big--there is nothing I can do as an individual to help.' The truth is there are few problems confronting humanity that are incapable of solution if only a sufficient number of human beings apply their hearts and energies. I believe that nothing in my life could ever have occurred except through God's will and also by the example of countless people. It is through them that I have learnt." During the 1940s and 1950s she labored tirelessly for those who had no voice in Germany and Eastern Europe. After she married Leonard Cheshire in 1958, her focus was international, and included work in India, Singapore, Australia, and Somalia. Her foundation set up scores of homes for victims of war and for the physically disabled. But it is the everyday stories she tells, revealing the degree to which Cheshire and Ryder integrated their faith, their work, and their marriage, that I find particularly inspiring.

In the words of Richard Morris, Cheshire "often told us that all journeys begin with a first step. If there are times when it seems that history, like polar ice, is afloat on currents which flow contrary to progress, we can nevertheless see that Leonard Cheshire and Sue Ryder together helped humanity forward for a measurable distance. There are few figures in history of which this can be said."