Feast day: February 11
Our Lady of Lourdes
In 1858 the Virgin Mary appeared 18 times to 14-year-old Bernadette Soubirous in Lourdes, France, identifying herself: 'I am the Immaculate Conception.'
On February 11, 1858, in the foothills of the Pyrenees in southern France, the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to a poor, sickly, fourteen-year-old girl named Bernadette Soubirous, who was gathering firewood near a grotto in the rock of Massabielle. Bernadette saw a young and beautiful lady, 'lovelier than I have ever seen,' standing in a hollow of the rock — a vision only she could see, though crowds soon gathered to watch her pray.
There were eighteen apparitions in all, ending in July of that year. The lady asked for prayer and penance for the conversion of sinners, told Bernadette to have a chapel built and processions made to the grotto, and directed her to a hidden spring, which the girl uncovered by scratching in the mud — and which began to flow, and flows still, the water associated with countless reported healings.
At one of the last apparitions Bernadette asked the lady her name, and received the answer that astonished the local priest and the world: 'I am the Immaculate Conception' — the very mystery the Church had defined as dogma only four years before. After careful investigation, the bishop declared the apparitions worthy of belief.
Lourdes became, and remains, one of the greatest pilgrimage shrines in the world, visited by millions every year, above all the sick and suffering who come seeking healing of body and soul. The Church keeps February 11 as the feast of Our Lady of Lourdes, and observes it as the World Day of the Sick, honoring all who suffer and those who care for them.
The Lourdes Medical Bureau — staffed by doctors of all faiths and none — has verified 70 cures as medically inexplicable.
“I am the Immaculate Conception.”
— Our Lady of Lourdes
Image: Dennis G. Jarvis (CC BY-SA 2.0), via Wikimedia Commons.
Source: newadvent.org/cathen/09389b.htm
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