Our Lady of Lourdes

Optional Memorial; World Day of the Sick

Feast Day

February 11

The Optional Memorial of Our Lady of Lourdes commemorates the apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary to Saint Bernadette Soubirous (1844-1879) at the grotto of Massabielle in Lourdes, in the diocese of Tarbes, France, between February 11 and July 16, 1858. There were eighteen apparitions in all.

Bernadette, the fourteen-year-old eldest daughter of an impoverished miller, recounted seeing on February 11, 1858, while gathering firewood with her sister and a friend, "a Lady" in white with a blue sash, holding a rosary, in the niche above the grotto. In subsequent apparitions the Lady asked for prayer, penance, and processions, and revealed to Bernadette a hitherto unknown spring at the grotto. On March 25, the Solemnity of the Annunciation, in response to Bernadette's repeated request for her name, the Lady joined her hands and said in the local Gascon Occitan dialect: "Que soy era Immaculada Councepciou": "I am the Immaculate Conception." The dogma of the Immaculate Conception had been defined by Blessed Pope Pius IX in the bull Ineffabilis Deus on December 8, 1854, less than four years earlier.

After a four-year canonical inquiry, Bishop Bertrand-Severe Laurence of Tarbes, in his judgment of January 18, 1862, declared that "the Immaculate Mary, Mother of God, did indeed appear to Bernadette Soubirous on February 11, 1858, and on subsequent days" and authorized public veneration. The bureau medical de Lourdes, established in 1883, examines reported cures; seventy have to date been judged inexplicable to medical science by international medical commissions and recognized as miraculous by the relevant local bishops.

Pope Leo XIII granted the universal feast in 1891. Pope Saint John Paul II in 1992 designated February 11 as the World Day of the Sick. Bernadette Soubirous, who entered the Sisters of Charity of Nevers in 1866 and died at Nevers on April 16, 1879, was canonized by Pope Pius XI on December 8, 1933.