Msgr. Beaulieu – February 11

Our Lady of Lourdes — World Day of the Sick

Our Lady of Lourdes is a title of the Blessed Virgin Mary that recalls her apparitions in 1858 in the grotto at Lourdes, France to Saint Bernadette Soubirous, a fourteen-year-old peasant girl. Between February 11 and July 16, 1858, the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared eighteen times to the fourteen-year-old Bernadette in what was, then, a small town located in the foothills of the Pyrenees mountains of southern France. Our Lady instructed Bernadette to dig in the ground nearby, from which came a spring with healing properties, active to  this day. Following a thorough ecclesiastical investigation, the apparitions were approved for devotion by the Catholic Church in 1862. A shrine was built there, which remains a popular place of pilgrimage.

Bernadette could neither read nor write and she only spoke the Occitan dialect or the lenga d’òc of her area. It is a dialect still spoken in southern France, Monaco, in Italy’s Occitan Valley and Spain’s Val d’Aran. At that time, her family was sinking into poverty, and the day the first apparition took place was when she went to gather firewood along the bank of the River Gave to help her mother. Her attention was drawn to the noise of rustling bushes near the Grotto of Massabielle, from the French words vieille masse meaning “ancient mass”. Then Bernadette saw a beautiful young girl of sixteen or seventeen years of age. She described this maiden as “dressed in a white robe, girded at the waist with a blue ribbon. She wore upon her head a white veil that gave just a glimpse of hair. Her feet were bare but covered by the last folds of her robe and a yellow rose was upon each of them. She held on her right arm a rosary of white beads with a chain of gold shining like the two roses on her feet.” Bernadette knelt and began to pray the rosary. At the end of its five decades, the woman smiled and disappeared.

A week later, the young visionary returned, so, on February 18 Our Lady began her message telling this to Bernadette, “I do not promise to make you happy in this life but in the next.” Subsequently, on February 24, the Virgin Mary asked for penance and prayer for the conversion of sinners and, on the  day after that,  she instructed Bernadette to dig the ground near the grotto. It was from there that a spring gushed forth which to this day is used to bathe pilgrims to Lourdes. In the apparition of March 2, Bernadette was instructed by Our Lady to “tell the priests that people should come here in procession and that a chapel should be built on the site.” On the Feast of the Annunciation, March 25, the Blessed Virgin told Bernadette in the Occitan dialect of Lourdes, “Que soy era Immaculada Concepciou” or, in English, “I am the Immaculate Conception.” The future saint had no idea what Immaculate Conception meant, since that dogma had only been solemnly promulgated  by Pope Pius IX a few years earlier on December 8, 1854.

Our Lady of Lourdes, pray for us!

Annual World Day of the Sick – February 11

Since 1992, each year on the liturgical memorial of Our Lady of Lourdes, the Church observes the World Day of the Sick. This year, on the occasion of the 33rd World Day of the Sick, during the Jubilee Year of Hope, Pope Francis wrote, “Hope does not disappoint” (Rm 5:5) but strengthens us in times of trial.” The latest (and 70th) approved miracle involved a healing in the water of Lourdes of Sister Bernadette Moriau, dating from 2018.

What is known as the Bureau of Medical Observations was created in 1883 and, today, it is under the responsibility of Doctor Alessandro de Franciscis. In 2009, he was appointed by the bishop of Tarbes and Lourdes to be the 15th Médecin Permanent—that is, the president—of the Bureau des Constatations Médicales de Lourdes, or the Lourdes Office of Medical Observations, which over the last forty or so years has recorded more than 7000 dossiers of claims of a cure – with only one percent being designated as miraculous cures!

Let us pray: “Bring comfort to those who suffer. Bring consolation to those who despair. Bring strength to those of us who walk with the sick.” Amen.