Our Lady of Lourdes

On February 11, 1858, a fourteen-year-old girl named Bernadette Soubirous saw a lady in the grotto of Massabielle, at Lourdes in the French Pyrenees. Further apparitions followed through July 16. On March 25 the lady said, in the local dialect, “I am the Immaculate Conception.” Bernadette did not know the theological formula. Pope Pius IX had defined the dogma only four years earlier, in 1854. The Church investigated, and in 1862 the bishop of Tarbes declared that the apparitions bore the marks of truth. Bernadette, later a Sister of Charity at Nevers, was canonized in 1933. She is not the object of the memorial. Mary is.

The spring Bernadette uncovered at the lady’s instruction became the place of washing and of pilgrimage. The Church does not teach that every cure claimed at Lourdes is a miracle, and she does not teach that God owes healing to anyone who travels. The Lourdes Medical Bureau examines cases with unusual strictness. A handful have been recognized by the Church as miracles beyond medical explanation. Most pilgrims return with the same illness they brought. The shrine’s own spirituality says that the first gift is conversion, confession, and the anointing of the sick, not a guaranteed cure. To treat Lourdes as a clinic with better marketing is to miss Bernadette, who remained sick and poor after the apparitions.

Pope John Paul II established the World Day of the Sick on this memorial. The first observance was in 1993. It is a pastoral day, not a new feast: the Church looks at the sick, at those who care for them, and at the sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick. February 11 remains an optional memorial. A parish may celebrate it, or the weekday, or a saint of the local calendar when the rubrics allow. The rank is deliberately modest. Lourdes is enormous in Catholic life and small on the universal calendar, which is a useful correction.

The lady of Lourdes asked for penance, for a chapel, and for people to come in procession. She identified herself with the privilege defined in 1854: preserved from original sin from the first moment of her conception, by the merits of Christ. The memorial therefore looks back to December 8 as well as to a grotto in France. Mary’s holiness is for the sake of the Son. The sick who go to Lourdes go to Christ.

When the memorial is celebrated, the prayers speak of Mary’s immaculate conception and of healing for the sick in body and soul. The Gloria is not added merely because the shrine is famous. An optional memorial does not become a solemnity. Parishes often celebrate the Anointing of the Sick on or near this day, which is a better observance than a lecture about unexplained cures.