Lourdes: Possessed woman kills mother with crucifix

A disturbing case in France. A French woman who thought that she was possessed by the Devil has murdered her elderly mother with a crucifix.

The killing took place in the Catholic site of pilgrimage Lourdes, in the French Pyrenees. French media reported the case on Wednesday. ‘I had visions in a dream. I saw that I was the Devil,’ said the 34-year old woman to police officers after her arrest. Her apartment in Lourdes was replete with crucifixes. She killed her 81-year old mother with one of the crucifixes and a lamp. After the murder on Monday evening she telephoned the authorities who found her smeared with blood. The woman has been committed to a psychiatric hospital. Lourdes is a world famous place of pilgrimage in the south of France drawing millions of Catholics every year in the hope of being cured of their ailments. This would happen after a visit to the cave where the Virgin Mary appeared to the desperately ill Bernadette Soubirous in the nineteenth century. In 1933, Bernadette, who died at age thirty-five, was beatified by Pope Pius XI.