Our Lady of Lourdes

Their story

On February 11, 1858, a fourteen-year-old girl named Bernadette Soubirous went with her sister and a friend to gather firewood near a grotto called Massabielle, outside the town of Lourdes in southern France. Bernadette's family was very poor, and she was often sick with asthma. While the other girls crossed a stream, she saw a beautiful young lady in the grotto, dressed in white with a blue sash, holding a rosary, with a golden rose on each foot. Bernadette knelt and prayed the rosary, and the lady prayed with her. Over the next five months the lady appeared to Bernadette eighteen times. She asked for prayer and penance for sinners, and she asked that a chapel be built and that people come there in procession. One day she told Bernadette to dig in the ground and drink from the spring, and a spring of water began to flow that still flows today. On March 25, the feast of the Annunciation, Bernadette asked the lady her name. She answered, "I am the Immaculate Conception." Bernadette did not understand the words, but four years earlier Pope Pius IX had solemnly declared that Mary was conceived without original sin. In 1862 the bishop declared that the apparitions were authentic. Lourdes became one of the greatest places of pilgrimage in the world, especially for the sick. Millions come each year to pray, to bathe in the water and to be blessed, and the Church has recognized about seventy healings there as miracles. Bernadette became a religious sister and died in 1879, and she was canonized in 1933. In 1992 Pope St. John Paul II made February 11 the World Day of the Sick.