It’s never happened before, but the Archbishop of Canterbury is about to make a historic visit to the most popular Catholic shrine in the world.

From the Daily Mail:

Doctor Rowan Williams is to become the first leader of the Church of England to make a pilgrimage to the Roman Catholic shrine of Lourdes.

The Archbishop of Canterbury flies to the shrine of Our Lady in the French Pyrenees on Monday, a week after Pope Benedict XVI made his own pilgrimage there.

He will be part of a historic pilgrimage of ten Church of England bishops, 60 Anglican priests and 400 Anglican lay worshippers.

The event shows how church leaders are committed to closer ties. Dr Williams will preach, take part in a number of Catholic celebrations and pray at a grotto where St Bernadette said the Virgin appeared to her 150 years ago.

His visit, at the personal invitation of the Catholic Bishop of Tarbes and Lourdes, Jacques Perrier, indicates that Anglican and Catholic leaders remain committed to closer relations in spite of differences over the ordination of women and sexually-active gay men as priests and bishops.

Father Graeme Rowlands, a north London Anglican vicar and the organiser of the pilgrimage, said Dr Williams was making the visit of his own volition.

‘It was his decision to go on pilgrimage to Lourdes and nobody else’s,’ said Father Rowlands.

‘It was his devotion to Our Lady in the end really that persuaded him to go. He has a very genuine devotion to Our Lady.’

Dr Williams will spend three days in Lourdes before returning to Britain.

The purpose of the visit is primarily to help to fulfil the ‘Christian unity mission’ of the Lourdes ‘jubilee’ year, which began on December 8.

Lourdes became the most visited shrine in Europe after Bernadette, a peasant girl, said she had seen a vision of a beautiful woman who described herself as the ‘Immaculate Conception’, a reference to her having been born without the stain of original sin.

The apparition told St Bernadette to dig for a spring to which many people would come for healing.

Six million pilgrims, many of them ill, disabled and dying, make pilgrimages to Lourdes each year. Eight million visitors are expected this year.