Our Lady of Lourdes is one of the most popular and beloved titles of Mary venerated in the Catholic Church and all over the world. On February 11, 1858, a young, French peasant girl named Bernadette was collecting firewood with her sister and a friend near a dumping ground in the town of Lourdes where they lived.
Sr. Bernadette Moriau, a nun from the Congregation of the Franciscan Oblates of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, was healed on 11th July 2008 after her pilgrimage to Lourdes. This healing was recognised on 11th February 2018 and is officially the 70th miracle attributed to the intercession of Our Lady of Lourdes.
In 1933, Bernadette was declared a Saint by the highest authority in the Church. – from the booklet Saint Bernadette – Miracles at Lourdes, The Facts Behind The Story, by Father A. E. Bennett, B.A.; published by the Australian Catholic Truth Society, 1945
The lady also told Bernadette to ask clergy to build a chapel on the site. Lourdes now has an immense shrine complex that includes a basilica built right over the grotto where the lady appeared. The Catholic church has documented sixty-nine miracles at Lourdes as of 2017.
The 70th miracle has just been affirmed by the Church this past Sunday, February 11—the Feast of Our Lady of Lourdes and the 160th anniversary of Mary’s first apparition to St. Bernadette.
“Everyone here helps each other with great joy, spontaneously and with good humour.” Margarita calls this “the miracle of the encounter.” A miracle of which, according to her, “God is the instigator but complicit with the Virgin Mary”. Before saying goodbye, the young teacher wanted to share the message that God gave her in Lourdes.
In 1858, Bernadette Soubirous reported a vision of Our Lady of Lourdes. A simple 14-year-old peasant girl of no significant educational experience, Soubirous claimed she saw “uo petito damizelo”, "a petite damsel," in white, with a golden rosary and blue belt fastened around her waist, and two golden roses at her feet.
Bernadette Soubirous of Lourdes. In the middle of the nineteenth century, Lourdes was a small garrison town of four or five thousand inhabitants, situated in the foothills of the Pyrénées on the River Gave.
Saint Bernadette Soubirous (Occitan: Bernadeta Sobirós; 7 January 1844 – 16 April 1879), also known as Saint Bernadette of Lourdes, was the firstborn daughter of a miller from Lourdes (Lorda in Occitan), in the department of Hautes-Pyrénées in France, and is best known for experiencing Marian apparitions of a "young lady" who asked for a chapel to be built at the nearby cave-grotto at …
Many hoped for medical miracles, while others came for moral or spiritual healing. Drinking it is easy, as it is free-flowing from taps labelled in six languages. At the side of the basilica, we joined hundreds of visitors and filled our water bottles. Grotto. The Lourdes grotto is the spot where Saint Bernadette experienced 18 apparitions in 1858.