Our Lady of Lourdes

In 1858, a poor fourteen-year-old girl named Bernadette Soubirous asked her local priests to build a chapel on the site of a local garbage dump — and she invited her neighbors to go there in procession. These seemed to be crazy requests from an unlikely authority.

Bernadette was sickly and small for her age — four feet, seven inches. She was the oldest of nine children in a very poor family, whose home was a single small basement room. Bernadette could barely read or write.

But she received her messages from a radiant young woman beautifully dressed in white, and she felt compelled to follow through on her directions. The woman identified herself eventually as “the Immaculate Conception.”

When Bernadette received her first apparition, she was gathering wood with her sister and a friend, but the other girls could not see what Bernadette saw, and they refused to believe her. Nor would her mother believe her when she got home. In fact, her mother beat both Bernadette and her sister and warned them not to speak nonsense.

Bernadette told the matter in the confessional. Her priest was troubled by her testimony and, with the girl’s permission, brought the matter to the pastor; but the pastor was standoffish, urging him to wait and see.

Meanwhile, word spread, and curiosity drew local children to follow Bernadette as she returned to the site of her vision. Once again, she was rapt in the experience. One of her friends dropped a large rock from above the place where Bernadette saw the lady. The noise shocked the children, but Bernadette remained unaware, focused entirely on the radiance in front of her.

She stood by her account of what was happening, but she found little support. In school her teachers felt free to slap her and accuse her of lying or suffering delusions. Her classmates taunted her.

But gradually some — and then many — people believed. The state subjected Bernadette to grueling interrogations, and Church authorities investigated her as well. Even a member of the national parliament came to render judgment. But the simple child remained consistent.

The apparitions continued for weeks, and one day the beautiful lady led Bernadette to uncover a spring of pure water.

Pilgrims came first from the surrounding countryside and then from the distant cities. The spring waters proved, repeatedly, to have curative properties.

Pilgrims still come to Lourdes, more than a century and a half later. Since 1858 more than a quarter of a billion have made the journey to Lourdes. Tens of thousands have claimed to be cured. Around seven thousand have submitted their cures for investigation by the Medical Bureau of Lourdes. Of those, only seventy cases have been certified as miracles.

In France in the early nineteenth century, many people sought salvation in political ideas, which promised peace but led to bloodshed. Bernadette arrived as a sign of contradiction. “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong” (1 Corinthians 1:27).