Lourdes

Lourdes, located in the Hautes-Pyrénées area in France, is among the world's most important places of Catholic pilgrimage. Each year, Lourdes welcomes nearly 6 million visitors.

The religious significance of Lourdes originated in the events of February 11, 1858, when young Bernadette Soubirous, a 14-year-old girl from a modest family and in poor health, claimed to have seen a “young lady” who appeared to her in Massabielle's grotto, close to the village of Lourdes. According to Bernadette's account, she was the chosen witness of 18 apparitions, during which she was given the task of messenger. Afterward, a water spring was discovered thanks to the “young lady's” indications and was soon credited with having miraculous properties, which has contributed notably to the increase in the thaumaturgic fame of the locale. Father Peyramale, the village abbott, pressed Bernadette to identify the apparition's nature, while some local residents already speculated that it could be the Virgin Mary. During the 16th apparition, Bernadette claimed that she received, in local dialect, the following answer: “I am the Immaculate Conception.” This claim echoed the dogma of the Immaculate Conception that had been proclaimed by the Vatican 4 years previously. From this date on, ecclesiastical authorities have stood up for the authenticity of Bernadette's apparitions, and the little village of Lourdes has attracted more and more people.

On January 18, 1862, after 3 years of investigation, the Bishop of Tarbes, his lordship Laurence, declared acknowledgment of the authenticity of the apparitions, based on evaluation of Bernadette's mental health, on seven cases of healing officially recognized as miraculous, and on the impressive religiosity that had characterized the locale since the events. Since then, the Church has erected large sanctuaries and developed a whole infrastructure necessary to receive thousands of pilgrims. Bernadette Soubirous, determined to become a nun in the Congrégation des surs de la Charité de Nevers, left Lourdes in 1864 and did not return. To the present day, pilgrims flock to this little village of the Hautes-Pyrénées, which fate has irrevocably changed.

After the apparitions of the “rue du Bac” (Paris, 1830), of La Salette (1848), of Lourdes (1858), and of Pontmain (1871), Marian pilgrimages have experienced an important renewal; in consequence, ecclesial institutions have been willing to control and to organize them. During the 19th century, places of Marian apparition posed a double challenge for the Church: On the one hand, the stimulation of Marian religious faith resulted in the questioning of ecclesiastic authorities, and on the other, the miraculous healings, which were necessary for the Church to authenticate the apparitions, generated exchanges of polemics between Church authorities and members of the medical science community during that positivist century. With the medical commission of 1959, the Bureau des Constatations Médicales in 1883, and then the International Medical Committee of Lourdes in 1947, Lourdes has become the pioneer of implementation procedures that aim to appeal to medical judgment for authenticating miraculous healings.

As the primary site of contemporary Catholic pilgrimage, Lourdes continues to welcome great numbers of pilgrims. At the same time, the nature of the pilgrimage itself underwent a change during the latter 20th century. Related perhaps to broader changes in religious observance in Western societies, the devotion to “Notre Dame de Lourdes” lost its character of religious duty and focused more on issues of inner healing. If pilgrims formerly came to Lourdes in the hope of healing their own physical ailment or that of a close relative, today pilgrims are more inclined to see Lourdes as a suitable place to express their pain and to acquire a new vision of the meaning of their own life.

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