Our Lady of Lourdes is a Catholic Marian devotion referring to the eighteen apparitions that Bernadette Soubirous claimed to have witnessed in 1858 at the Grotto of Massabielle , outside the city of Lourdes , France , in the foothills of the Pyrenees . 1
During Bernadette’s lifetime, many Catholics believed in apparitions of the Virgin Mary as a vehicle of God’s grace , and Pope Pius IX authorized the local bishop to permit veneration of the Virgin Mary at Lourdes in 1862, some seventeen years before Bernadette’s death.
Bernadette Soubirous was proclaimed a saint by Pius XI on 8 December 1933. Since then, the title of the Virgin Mary as Our Lady of Lourdes has been a source of great veneration, and her sanctuary is one of the most visited in the world: some 8,000,000 people make pilgrimages there every year. 2
Our Lady of Lourdes is associated with the Catholic dogma of the Immaculate Conception , as the vision came to Bernadette under this name, according to what she claimed. The Catholic Church invokes Our Lady of Lourdes as the patron saint of the sick, because many of them flock to Lourdes for the miraculous reputation of Lourdes water .
Bernadette Soubirous , a poor and illiterate fourteen-year-old teenager, claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary eighteen times in the grotto of Massabielle , west of Lourdes , between February 11 and July 16, 1858. 1
She said that a young lady appeared to her, dressed in white with a blue ribbon around her waist, with her hands together in an attitude of prayer, with a rosary hanging from her arm, with a golden rose on each foot and a white veil covering her hair.
In the third apparition, the girl claimed to have spoken to the Lady in Gascon , the Occitan dialect used in the area, who addressed her using the polite “you” ( voi ) and asking her: “Would you do me the favor of coming here for fifteen days?” ( Boulet aoue era gracia de bié aci penden quinze dias? ). Bernadette promised her that she would do so. In turn, the Lady announced to her that she did not promise to make her happy in this world, but in the next. 1 3
In successive appearances, the message took shape: 1 3
On February 25, Bernadette testified, the Virgin told her to go and drink water from the spring and eat the plants that grew freely there. She interpreted that she was to go and drink water from the nearby river Gave, and she went there. But the Lady pointed her finger at her to dig in the ground. As she dug in the mud and tried to drink, Bernadette soiled her face, and her gestures and appearance were met with skepticism by many of the 350 people present, since the spring did not immediately appear. However, soon afterward a spring of water arose 1 3 which, to this day, is a destination of pilgrimages for many Catholics and has witnessed numerous miracles. 4 The spring that gushed forth on February 25, 1858, produces one hundred thousand liters of water per day, continuously from that date to the present day.
In response to Bernadette’s repeated requests to reveal her name, on 25 March 1858 (at her sixteenth apparition) Our Lady told her: ” Que soy era Immaculada Councepciou ” (“I am the Immaculate Conception “). The Catholic dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary had been solemnly proclaimed on 8 December 1854, three earlier. The expression was foreign to Bernadette’s vocabulary and was initially a source of confusion both to Father Peyramale himself – the parish priest of Lourdes – and to other ecclesiastical and civil authorities. However, Bernadette maintained a consistent attitude of calm throughout the incisive questioning, without changing her story or her attitude, or claiming to have any knowledge beyond what she had said regarding the visions described.