LOURDES, France -- Carrying flags and banners, handmade crosses, and candles as tall as a man, a quarter-million pilgrims approached the shrine here during Holy Week -- many of them barefoot, some on their knees -- to celebrate Easter at the mountain grotto where St. Bernadette encountered the Virgin Mary in 1858.

The visitors marked the start of a new season of pilgrimage in which about 6 million people will flock to this simple village at the foot of the Pyrenees, in southwest France. They will march in procession, kneel in prayer and light 3 million candles -- so many that the shrine maintains a staff of 20 just to scrape away the melted wax. Lourdes is such a popular destination that the town of 15,000 residents has more hotel rooms than any city in France outside Paris.

All of which makes the shrine at Lourdes an island of faith in a secular sea.

Throughout Western Europe, statistics on church attendance, baptisms and other acts of formal religion have been in steep decline for the past four decades. But the number of pilgrims at Lourdes holds steady, year after year.

Many who come are deeply involved in spiritual matters; their trips are arranged by churches or other religious groups. But there are also large numbers who don't have much to do with organized religion, but still feel the pull of the sacred mysteries here.

Among the milling thousands at Easter was Georg Muller, a Berliner who described himself as "quasi-Lutheran."

"This might be the closest I get to a church until Christmas," Muller said matter-of-factly. "But our group [of parents of disabled children] was coming here, and I thought, yes, it might help, because Bernadette herself was troubled in health all her life."

He was talking about Bernadette Soubirous, the illiterate 14-year-old from a poor family in Lourdes who went to the grotto beside the River Gave on an icy day in February 1858 to get firewood for her family's hovel. She reported that she had seen a lady in white, holding a rosary, inside the cave.

Bernadette subsequently had 17 more visits with the lady, drawing thousands of onlookers as word of her visions spread. At the urging of the local priest, the girl asked the lady her name. The reply she heard -- "I am the Immaculate Conception." -- convinced church authorities that she was in fact meeting the Virgin Mary.

In 1854, Pope Pius IX had declared that Mary was the only human ever born without sin. This doctrine was known to theologians as immaculate conception. It seemed impossible that an unschooled girl in a remote mountain town would ever have heard the term.

More than 2,000 sick or crippled people have reported being cured after drinking or bathing in the water at the grotto of Lourdes, and 66 of these recoveries have been certified as miraculous by a medical board. In recent years, the number of reported cures has decreased. Many visitors today say they come in search of something other than medical help.

Mary Caldor, of Leeds, England, was pushing her son Neville's wheelchair toward the grotto on a brisk Good Friday morning. "We didn't come expecting a cure," she said. "But you feel a power here, don't you? And the acceptance of that power in the world helps you to accept what you've been given."