59. Lourdes; 150 Years Later

Photo: Statue of Saint Bernadette

This is not the story of Mary the mother of Jesus. This is the story of a girl who saw “The Immaculate Conception”.

As a child who grew up in the backstreets of the Midlands in England I’m not in the habit of going around showing any kind of devotion openly. But, as I am not able to shake off this thing called religion from my DNA, I sometimes indulge in harping upon such things as Feast Days, Saints, piety, devotion, pilgrimages and all that kind of paraphernalia. However, I don’t do so because it’s required, expected or do it because the rest do it- I mean they train journalists on local papers to write up on events that occur in town because of the local appeal- if there’s the “biggest marrow” competition, off they go with paper pencil and tape recorder to get all the facts- right down to the last centimetre. That’s not me at all. If I am writing about Lourdes now it’s not just because it is one hundred and fifty years ago today that a “pretty Lady dressed in white and blue” appeared to Bernadette in a place near Lourdes but because it has something to do with the matter on hand at the moment.

It could well be something quite as banal as looking through my photographs and finding one that I really must show off and put it on my blog, or someone who makes a comment like, that Lourdes is just the same usual stuff, all to do with money, a major tourist attraction... Which is really like water off a duck’s back to me because I see nothing wrong in wanting to take back home with me a bottle of water that sprung from a well where the “beautiful” lady said it would and that 67 people who had bathed in those waters have been declared “healed without reason”... so as not to be more precise and call them miracles. As I am one who has a strange relationship with miracles- to explain- when I used to work for the U.S. Army in Vicenza in the Records Management Office I used to have a big notice, that many under-pressure lasses have, stuck on the wall behind my chair which said “The impossible we do at once, Miracles take a little longer” So, I now try to find another word to describe that phenomena called “miracle”.

I guess, “unexplained healing” rather than “healed without reason” is probably more adapt to a miracle... However, to me, it makes no difference if it can be explained or not; if people want to throw their bodies into the waters of Lourdes because it means something to them who am I or you to stop them? The importance of Lourdes is not how many miracles it has performed but how many people it has changed. Because, when one goes to Lourdes, many do not come back the same way as when they went there, (and I’m not talking about boats and trains either). People are not the same as when they left, they come back changed.

And if by chance one of those unexplainable healings take place in someone, it is only one of the least things that occur, the least, of the changes that take place in people who go there.

How do I know? Asks he who said this is just a tourist attraction.

Witnesses... just witnesses...

But what I find enthralling is that there are so many people who find it hard if not impossible to believe that Our Lady is the Immaculate Conception, in other words born without original sin who, besides Jesus, is the only human being to be sinless, completely sinless.  Even I find that perplexing, and can understand why so many say, the Church has got it all wrong- infallibility or no infallibility.

However, when a simple country girl who barely knows the alphabet comes out saying she has seen the Immaculate Conception, whom few people would have heard about, since the dogma of such was only defined in 1854, four years previous to when Bernadette claims to have seen the apparition, one has to stop and think.

One thing is saying something, another is backing it up with miracles- a stream suddenly springing up from nowhere and waters that cured the lame, the blind and so on.  At this point, dogma or no dogma, Bernadette really did see "The Immaculate Conception" ... and therefore the mother of Jesus was born without original sin, nor ever committed one in her lifetime.  And to try and knock down that theory would be very hard to beat.