A senior official at Lourdes has hailed British pilgrimages as the best in the world.

Dr Alessandro de Franciscis, president of the Office of Medical Observations, said that pilgrimages organised in Britain and Ireland were so good that he was proposing them as a model for the rest of the world.

“If you asked me what has most surprised me in my seven-year tenure in Lourdes, it was the presence of the people of the British Isles,” said Dr de Franciscis. “That surprised me very positively.”

He said he had never imagined “the love and the structure and the style that the pilgrimages from England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland live in Lourdes”. Britain and Ireland, he said, organised diocesan pilgrimages in a different way from the rest of Europe, where they were mainly individual or parish-based.