Our Lady of Lourdes
It is celebrated on February 11
On December 8, 1854, Pope Pius IX had defined the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary. As if to indicate that heaven ratified what the Vicar of Jesus Christ had done on earth, on February 11, four years later (1858), the Virgin Mary appeared to the little girl Bernadette Soubirous. And she did it eighteen times in all… In the opening of the rock of Massabielle stands before her eyes a young woman, motionless and silent; “so beautiful that when she has seen it once, she will want to die to see it again”. It is worth listening to herself recount, with her great ingenuousness, what happened there:
“One day I went to the bank of the Gave river to collect firewood with two other girls. Right away I heard like a noise. I looked at the meadow, but the trees did not move. Then I raised my head towards the grotto and saw a woman dressed in white, with a light blue belt and on each of her feet a yellow rose, the same color as the beads of her rosary. He beckoned me to come closer. (..) ”
“Then it occurred to me to pray and I put my hand in my pocket to look for the rosary. I knelt down. I saw that the young woman crossed herself… While I prayed, she was passing out the beads of the Rosary (…) Finished the rosary, I smiled again, rose a little and disappeared (…) That Lady did not speak to me until the third time…
It is worth remembering Saint Bernadette Soubirous a little. She was born in 1844 and was the oldest of six children. She was a simple girl, with little preparation or culture because her parents, extremely poor, could not send her to do special studies. In the third apparition she told the Virgin Mary: “I will not make you happy in this world but in the other”. And she was fulfilled. She was neither secular nor religious in her life, carried on by palms as one might suppose.
The eleventh day of February of that year 1858 fell on a Thursday. It was a harsh winter day. Bernadette accompanied by her sister Toneta and her little friend Juana de Ella, go to see if they can find wood to warm themselves by the fire. Her mother had instructed Bernadette that, since she was in poor health and would catch a cold right away, she should try not to get her feet wet. Her sister and Juana crossed the creek. She was left alone and that is when the apparition that we have already seen related to from her pen arrived…
When Toneta and Juana returned, Bernadette asked them: “Have you seen anything?” Bernadette was radiant, and they, all curious, asked her: “And you, what have you seen?”… With great secrecy, and not without first making them promise that they would tell no one, she told them about the vision she had had… But… when we got home, everything was discovered. The ordeal that awaited poor Bernadette is not easy to describe in a few lines. She was forbidden to return to the grotto, but impelled by an inner force, she went there and there she saw the Virgin eighteen times. In the sixth, on February 21, “he directed his gaze for a moment over my head, to travel the world. Then, turning his eyes full of pain on me, he said to me: “Pray to God for sinners.” Likewise, several times, later: Penance, penance On the eleventh, this charge: Go tell the priests to have a chapel built here,
And two days later: I want you to come here in procession.
On March 4, a mother immerses her sick son in the new spring, which has made its way to the side of the grotto; and she first proclaims her joy, feeling her son healthy.
On March 25, “seeing her so kind, I asked her her name. She smiled at me. I asked her again, and she smiled again. She insisted again, and she told me “I am the Immaculate Conception.” On July 16, more beautiful than never, smiling with ineffable sweetness, he bowed his head in farewell and disappeared.
Soon that humble place of Lourdes became famous throughout the world. Pilgrims came from all over the place, until it became a place of pilgrimage for Europe and other parts of the world. There is no doubt that it is one of the most visited and most revered Shrines on all the continents. Disbelievers have gone there and found faith. Sick in body and soul, and have found health for both or for one of the two. There is a great devotion, the presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist, the loving forgiveness and the activity of the Mediatrix of all graces. Those who visit it once go out with the firm intention of returning one and more times to be able to experience the supernatural presence that is breathed there. There are many miracles that the Virgin Mary works from the Grotto of Massabielle to those who come to Her.
When a healing occurs in an incomprehensible way, the doctor responsible for the pilgrimage reports it to the doctor in charge of the medical office in Lourdes. If the investigative process is positive, the case is taken to the Lourdes International Committee, based in Paris, made up of some 30 doctors from all specialties and belonging to different races, ideologies, nationalities and beliefs, including agnostics. And finally comes into play the ecclesiastical authority. The study in each case is thorough, and to admit the possible miracle, requires four requirements:
a) Incurable disease or curable only exceptionally.
b) Total inefficiency of the remedies used in their treatment.
c) That it happened instantaneously or almost instantaneously.
d) That it was absolute.
The miracle number 68 recognized in Lourdes is that of the Salesian nun Luigina Traverso, which occurred in 1965. The miracle, added the note from the Shrine, was declared such by the Italian bishop Alceste Catella, of the diocese of Casale Monferrato, where the sister lives. healed. When she visited Lourdes in 1965, Sister Luigina Traverso was suffering from “paralyzing sciatica in meningocele”, a serious, paralyzing and painful illness for which she had been unsuccessfully operated on multiple times. The inexplicable, complete and permanent healing of her was presented in July 2010 before the Office of Medical Findings that examines the supposed healings that are declared after the visit to the Marian sanctuary, reported Catholic media. The nun, who in 1965 traveled on a stretcher to Lourdes and returned to Italy on her own feet, said she felt a “strong heat” in her body and the desire to get up when the celebrant passed by with the consecrated host.
The penultimate recognized miracle, number 69, is that of Danila Castelli, an Italian wife and mother of a family, who began to suffer from “serious spontaneous hypertensive crises” in 1980, at the age of 34. In 1989, during a pilgrimage to Lourdes, Danila emerged from the shrine’s pools feeling “extraordinary well-being.”
A few months later, the Italian reported her recovery to the Sanctuary’s Office of Medical Findings. Years passed and it was found that the healing was really lasting, with 5 meetings in the Office in 1989 and 2010.
That year the Office concluded that “Mrs. Castelli was completely and lastingly cured, since her pilgrimage to Lourdes in 1989, of the illness from which she suffered, and this without any relation to the surgeries or treatments”.
His recovery was certified as “unexplained in the current state of scientific knowledge.”
The last miracle, recognized on February 11, 2018, was the miraculous healing of Sister Bernadette Moriau, who thus becomes the 70th certified by the demanding Lourdes medical commission. This nun, born in 1939 in Valenciennes (France), belongs to the order of the Franciscan Oblates of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
He suffered from a pathology in the so-called horse tail or cauda equina, a nerve group at the end of the spinal cord that is essential for the mobility of the lower extremities and the functionality of the pelvic organs. She underwent spinal surgery four times, the first in 1968 and the last in 1975. There was no improvement and from 1988 she became progressively disabled due to the neurological consequences of her disease. In 1994 she began taking morphine to alleviate her disabling pain. She wore a lumbar corset, and also from the year 2000 they put a catheter to urinate, since the paralysis also affected her bladder. In 2004 her foot sprained as a result of the same thing, and she had to wear a prosthesis day and night to try to correct it.
In 2008 she traveled to Lourdes as a sick woman to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the apparitions and was cured of her serious illness.
Among the more than 8,000 healings that have taken place in Lourdes in more than a century and a half, only 70 have been officially recognized as of 2018.
THE NOBEL LAWYERS AND THE VIRGIN OF LOURDES
The debate about the apparitions and healings in Lourdes has been going on for decades and the ridicule and criticism of the most belligerent atheists contrast with the respect and consideration of professionals of recognized prestige in the face of a religious phenomenon that leaves no one indifferent.
This is the case of the Nobel Prize in Medicine and Prince of Asturias, Luc Montagnier. This French doctor is known for having discovered the HIV virus as well as for other important contributions to science. And it is very interesting to know the opinion of this renowned scientist and former director of the Pasteur Institute precisely about Lourdes, a place that requires great faith. This fact was confirmed in a book that collected the dialogues between Montagnier and the Cistercian monk, Michel Niassaut, entitled Le Moine et le Nobel. At one point in the conversation, the inexplicable healings at Lourdes came up. What would a non-believing Nobel laureate in Medicine say about this matter? His answer will mean an example of coherence for the world of science. “When a phenomenon is inexplicable, if it really exists, there is no need to deny anything,” said Luc Montagnier emphatically. In this sense, the Nobel Prize for Medicine assured that “in the miracles of Lourdes there is something inexplicable”.
In addition, Montagnier disfigured the behavior of some of his colleagues and said in this book that “many scientists make the mistake of rejecting what they do not understand. I do not like this attitude. I often quote this phrase from the astrophysicist Carl Sagan: the absence of evidence, It is not proof of absence.”
However, Montagnier is not the only Nobel Prize winner who has a relationship with Lourdes. Much deeper was that of Alexis Carrel, Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1912. In fact, his relationship with these cures even led him to convert to Catholicism.
In 1903 Carrel was a young atheist doctor. A colleague who was going to accompany a group on a pilgrimage to Lourdes as a doctor could not attend and asked him to be the one to replace him. He agreed to go to personally verify the falsity of the miracles that were attributed to that place. But it was precisely there that he personally assisted one of them, a fact that changed his life.
I visited a woman dying of tuberculosis. He observed and analyzed all the symptoms. Without a doubt, she would die soon. The miracle happened before her eyes. I came out of the pools and everything was gone. That fact produced her conversion, which she narrated in a book that was a scandal for the dominant skeptical naturalism in France at that time.
PRAYER TO ASK FOR THE HEALTH OF THE SICK
Oh most lovable Virgin of Lourdes, Mother of God and our Mother! Full of affliction and with tears flowing from our eyes, we come in the bitter hours of illness to your maternal heart, to ask you to pour out the treasure of…