Our Lady of Lourdes

By Fr. Conor Donnelly

(Proofread)

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that You are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins, and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother, St. Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

We're told in the story of Cana of Galilee that “the Mother of Jesus was there” (John 2:1-11).

Today is the feast of Our Lady of Lourdes.

John Paul II, talking about the popularity of Lourdes in the last century, would like to say that possibly, it's also because “the Mother of Jesus is there.” Today, the World Day of the Sick, is a day to ask Our Lady of Lourdes for special things.

It's a day that marks the first apparition of Our Lady there in 1858 to a young girl, 14-year-old Bernadette Soubirous.

There were a total of eighteen apparitions in all, quite a large number. The message of Lourdes was, as always, a message of personal conversion, of prayer, of charity.

It was approved as a feast day by Pope Leo XIII, and Pope Pius X extended this feast day to the Universal Church. Bernadette herself was beatified and canonized by Pope Pius XI in 1925.

A couple of years previously, in 1854, the Church had defined the dogma, infallibly, the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. Then just four years later, in this very obscure little village which Lourdes is, hidden there in the Pyrenees, a place you'd pass by at the moment, you'd blink, you'd miss it, Our Lady chose to appear to this shepherd girl.

She appeared several times. Bernadette was eventually encouraged to ask the Lady who she was.

The whole phenomenon caused a lot of consternation of the local people, all sorts of interest and curiosity. And when she asked her, Bernadette said later, “She said, ‘I am the Immaculate Conception.’”

When she told this to the local priest and bishop, they realized there was no way that this little farming rural girl could possibly know what those words meant. But of course, they knew about the dogma that had been proclaimed four years earlier.

Little by little, in spite of many contradictions, and a lot of misunderstanding, which always accompanies the supernatural—Bernadette had to suffer a lot in her family: misunderstandings, accusations of fraud, all sorts of things, and punishments—eventually, she was believed, and a sculptor tried to make an image of the Lady that had appeared.

It was a very beautiful statue. When it was finished, Bernadette was asked what she thought of the statue: “Did the Lady look anything like this?” Despite the statue being a very beautiful statue, Bernadette said, “Oh, no, no, the Lady was much more beautiful.” The sculptor had done his best, but he didn't quite make it.

There was a curious statistic that I heard a number of years ago. Somebody was talking about the main tourist destinations in France. Of course, when you think about the main tourist destinations, I think most people in Europe certainly would think about the popular places that you hear about on the French Riviera, very stylish supper places.

But curiously, at the very top of the list of tourist destinations in France is Lourdes. None of these other very chic places attract anything like the numbers that Lourdes has attracted over the years. There's something special there. The Mother of Jesus was there (cf. John 2:1).

She appeared with her message of charity, of looking out for the sick. Today is the World Day of the Sick.

She was there to encourage the sick, to help them. And over time, she has performed many miracles; some of them spiritual, many physical. The cures and the miracles are almost numberless.

I met an Australian missionary in Japan. (I was in Japan, I met him in Singapore many years ago.) He wrote a book about Lourdes. It's a rather interesting book. It was called Healing Fire from Frozen Earth.

It was like a modern history of Lourdes, written in a very secular way, for a very secular readership of the 21st century, but with very cogent descriptions. You have to admit there's something very supernatural that was taking place there.

Our Lord wanted to entrust Our Lady with very special riches that she would transmit to humanity, a reminder of the infinite mercy of God. Our Lady reaches out to every single person.

In the Litany, we refer to her as Health of the Sick, Comfort of the Afflicted. At some stage in our life, we've all been more or less sick, or we know people that have been.

It's wonderful to know that we have a Mother to turn to, somebody who always understands us, somebody also who can bring good out of every suffering, so that in every little bit of suffering that we might endure and that Our Lady might permit in our life, we know that she's going to take this thing and convert it into something of great value.

Fulton Sheen tells a story of how there was a lady in the late 19th century, late 1800s, in Paris, a French lady, Catholic lady, who married a man who was the chairman of the Communist Party. He was also the editor of the Communist newspaper, a very prominent Communist.

She felt that God had given her this husband to convert him. He was a very intelligent man; she was just a very normal lady. She tried to brush up on her theology as best she could, or her doctrine, to engage him intellectually. But she more or less got nowhere; she didn't achieve anything. But after several years of marriage, she got very sick.

I think it was TB of the spine or something, and she had to be several years in an iron lung. She suffered an awful lot, but she and her husband were very much in love.

One day, after many years, she said to him, “After I die, you will convert and become a Catholic.” He was thinking, “I think my wife is nearing her end.” Because there was nothing further from his mind.

Then she said, “After that, you will enter a seminary and you will be ordained a Catholic priest.”

He said, “Definitely my wife is losing her mind.” There was nothing further from his thoughts; it was outside the bounds of possibility.

Then she said, “Because I have asked God to send me enough suffering in my life, to save your soul.” He dismissed these thoughts as the thoughts of a dying woman.

Then she passed away, and he had an awful lot of grief because he had loved her very much. He wanted somehow to reconnect with her spirit or to relive the moments they had spent together. He took time off, and he decided to go and visit all the places that they had been to in France on their honeymoon.

He began to travel all over France, as they did on their honeymoon. At one stage, he found himself in a small village, outside the local church, and he remembered that on their honeymoon, they had gone into the church.

It wasn't politically correct for him to be seen going to churches. He also hated going to churches; he had no time for that sort of thing. But he had made a promise to himself to go everywhere they had been on their honeymoon, so he went into the church.

Inside the church, he got this tremendous desire to go to Lourdes. Well, he had hated Lourdes. He had dismissed Lourdes as one of those Catholic superstitions and frauds in his communist newspaper. He condemned it from a height as silly superstitious stuff.

But here he had this great desire to go to Lourdes, so he went to Lourdes.

Standing in front of the grotto of Lourdes, he underwent a monumental conversion. So great were the graces of his conversion that the thought of going back to Paris and resigning from the chairmanship of the Communist Party and the editorship of the communist newspaper. It didn't cost him a thought.

A couple of months later, he entered a Dominican seminary, and eventually, he was ordained a priest.

Fulton Sheen says, “I did my retreat given by that Dominican priest in

1. It's not often in the course of your life where you attend a retreat where the preacher frequently says, ‘as my wife, Elizabeth used to say.’”

Our Lady is capable of the most monumental conversions. On feast days like today, we join the whole Church and the whole world in bringing to Our Lady our every need.

We know that she knows us very well. She hears our petitions, no matter what they may be.

That motherly assistance will fill us with peace and joy. In the last 150 years or more, she has heard the voices of so many children who pray to her.

Today, somebody sent me a little video clip of a Mass in Lourdes this morning, packed with thousands of people. So, the devotion to Our Lady of Lourdes is still very much alive and well.

Small children, when they stray from their mother, get uneasy. They can feel a bit lost, and more than a bit lost. Likewise, we have to try and make sure that we don't stray too much from Our Lady. We stay close to her.

In the intimacy of our personal prayer, we can ask her for things. Or see how we turn to Our Mother frequently during the day with our Angelus, with our Rosary, maybe in our Morning Offering, with our Memorares, or other little aspirations that we may say, asking for help in this thing or that thing, or lights to understand things a little better, or the fortitude we need to get this thing done, or that problem solved, or placing before her all of our children and grandchildren, so that we are truly a powerful force in their lives, a force of prayer.

I remember I had a relation whose parents were not—well, one was Catholic, one wasn't—they weren't practicing. This little girl managed to make her First Holy Communion. I remember my mother commenting, “It's the prayers of your grandmother.”

I always remember those words, trying to figure out, How do the prayers of my grandmother have anything to do with this little seven-year-old making her First Holy Communion?—as though saying it was a major miracle.

There are many things, perhaps as parents and grandparents, that we bring about through our prayer, and that God has been planning from all eternity, and our fidelity in prayer, our turning to Our Lady:

“Remember, O most Gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known, that anyone who fled to your protection, implored your help, or sought your intercession was left unaided.”

We know she's looking out for us all the time. She had a very clear message when she appeared in the grotto. She wanted to remind humanity of the need for conversion and penance. In nearly all of her apparitions, she said the same thing.

As in nearly all of her other apparitions, she's also prayed the rosary with Bernadette, as though emphasizing the power of the rosary.

She also spoke of how we can be co-redeemers with Christ, redeeming with Him, uniting our sufferings with Him on the cross—any pain, physical or moral, difficulties in our life, challenges, contradictions, mysteries—and also voluntary mortifications that we might do some day out of generosity, offering those things to Our Lady in atonement for all the sins of men.

With Our Lady beside us, we can come to see how things that might appear to be a great tragedy can bring about great good, and consider it through the eyes of faith.

I was at a special Mass about a week or so ago in Msongari in Loreto in Nairobi. It was the 100th anniversary of the Loreto Sisters in Kenya, and of course it was a very special moment. It’s possibly one of the longest-serving religious orders in Kenya.

Archbishop Kivuva said the Mass and he was saying many beautiful things about the contribution the Sisters had made to the Church in Kenya; what the Church in Kenya would not have been if it hadn't been for Loreto Sisters, and how he'd asked several kids, “Do you go to Loreto School?” They'd say, “No, but my mother did.”

He said, half the country said the same thing, in a couple of little clips that are very apt.

But being at this Mass and thinking about the six Sisters that arrived here in 1921, and a hundred years later, I reckon about a million girls have been educated. You can trust that beginning with the arrival point that we've reached 100 years later, it’s just unimaginable.

We couldn't even dream about it or think about it. Just incredible. You can't explain it in human terms. But of course, the story is one of faith and also one of heroism.

Along the way, there have been a lot of tragedies. There was a bus that went off the road in Meru a couple of years ago. Some students lost their lives, some lost limbs.

There was a train in the late 1990s that was coming from Mombasa with two Kenyan Loreto Sisters who were destined for important administrative positions, perhaps in the development of their order. There was a flood, the bridge was washed away, and when the train came there, it went into the river and that was the end of those nuns.

All sorts of heartbreaking tragedies have been part of the story. But when 100 years have passed and you look back, it's just amazing what has been achieved.

You see what God wants to do with our correspondence to grace. In our marriage, in our family, despite the contradictions or the difficulties or the things that haven't worked out, it's all a story of faith, of heroism, and of grace.

We can have great faith and trust in all the miracles that Our Lady wants to work in us and through us, through our fidelity, and places these examples before us.

This is a great message that we can transmit to people who may have illnesses, serious illnesses, maybe chronic things, or people who are born disabled, or who don't have the physical or mental talents that we might have. All these things invite us to trust more in God and to put God's power above our meager efforts.

He can do much greater things in a much greater way, but He just wants to use us as His humble instruments.

Maybe we make mistakes, and maybe things go wrong, but we just put one foot in front of the other. St. Paul tells us that we will not be tested beyond our strength (1 Cor. 10:13).

Even though there might be contradictions, or difficulties, or heartbreaks, we see these things through the eyes of faith, and we know that God has permitted this thing.

If He gives me this cross, He’ll give me the grace to be able to carry it. There will be no trial that will be too much.

If we remember that we are just children of God, children of Mary, we know that He will never let us down. The millions and millions of people that go to Lourdes every year, in many ways that's what they're stating with their feet. They go there to entrust themselves once again to Our Lady, telling her that we know that she will never give us more than we can handle.

St. Augustine says, “Do everything possible and ask for what is impossible” (cf. St. Augustine, Treatise on Nature and Grace, 43,5).

St. Josemaría used to say, “We're not just here to do the possible, anybody can do the possible; we're here to do the impossible” (cf. J. Escrivá, The Forge, Point 216).

When you look at the history of that particular religious order, you see that in many ways they've achieved the impossible.

Some of them were telling me that when they set up Loreto Limuru, the first school for African girls in the whole of East Africa, sometimes they didn't have food to eat. or in the emergency, the bullets were flying with the Mau Mau, all sorts of amazing challenges. But yet they hung in there.

Some of them were saying that when they got the initial girls that came to the first school, they managed to convince some of the chiefs to try and educate their daughters. Education was unheard of. The first group of ten or twelve came to the school, and within 24 hours, they all ran away. They had to be coaxed back to the school.

Then it was a boarding school. It was far away from where they lived, so they had to live in conditions, and they had sacks that were filled with grass. That's what the mattresses were. It was all very rudimentary.

But little by little they got these girls to the stage of doing the Cambridge exam. It was a big thing to be able to send the papers of these girls, after decades, to be corrected in England and get that standard.

This nun told me that when they sent the papers of the girls to be corrected in England, the nuns kept a carbon copy of the answers of the girls, in case the ship went down. Wow. Nothing was to stand in the way of the education of these girls. Wow.

You hear an anecdote or two like that, and you realize, my goodness, these were some women, with incredible ideas. That's why Archbishop Kivuva was able to say they have changed the face of education in this country. They set the standards, and they did incredible things, in the face of all sorts of difficulties.

Of course, their great boast is Wangari Maathai, a Nobel Prize winner. Not every school can boast of that. But of course, to achieve those sorts of things, there's commitment, there's ideals, there's the whole missionary thrust of the Church, the whole social teaching of the Church.

I wrote a bit of an article about this event, and I was saying, You know, we hear an awful lot about the empowerment of women in the world today in the 21st century, as though this is something enormously new.

But if you look back 100 years ago, these women were full of the ideals of the empowerment of women. It's very deeply there, the social teaching of the Catholic Church.

And they had to overcome all sorts of obstacles to make it happen: colonial governments and powers and all sorts of things. That's why their school was far away from Nairobi, near the railway.

We see a story of people going forward, step by step, doing things with the help of Our Lady, not being held back by anything, by any human force. We learn from this how we have to try and have that same faith.

John Paul II talked about how the vocation, or anybody's vocation, but particularly the vocation of Our Lady, was a pilgrimage of faith. A pilgrimage is a journeying forward, step by step.

The whole of your marriage vocation is a pilgrimage of faith. The whole of your Christian vocation, your apostolic vocation—there's always something for us to do. God is working there behind the scenes all the time.

We find many people going to shrines of Our Lady. Here in this country we have national shrines in Subukia; there's another one coming up in Kitui. Probably they will mushroom over time.

It’s a pretty good thing to let our children and grandchildren be aware of these places, or to go on pilgrimages there from time to time.

We hope to foster Marian piety, so that people also know the history of these sorts of places—particularly Lourdes, the major Marian shrine in the world—and to see how it's a place for them to go to, or a devotion to Our Lady of Lourdes, in time of difficulty.

John Paul II liked to ask the question, “Why is it precisely the sick who go on pilgrimage to Lourdes?” He says, “...because the Mother of Jesus is there” (John Paul II, Homily, 11 February 1980).

Some powerful, attractive force. She draws them there with great power because they know that she's there somehow.

I heard a story recently about a very good father somewhere in the rural States. On the parish grounds, there was a grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes, as there are all over the world.

He had a young son, and he wanted to have the son to have a lot of Marian piety. The son happened to ask him, “What's this grotto all about?”

He said, “Well, this is a very, very famous grotto. It goes back a long way in history, and there's one just like it in France. This was the major one here in our parish.” Some people get the story a little bit wrong, but at least the intentions are there.

John Paul II says, “The miraculous cure remains, however, in spite of everything, an exceptional event. Christ's salvific power, propitiated by the intercession of His Mother, is revealed at Lourdes, particularly in the spiritual sphere. It is in the hearts of the sick that Mary makes the voice of her Son heard: a voice that dissolves miraculously the stiffening of bitterness and rebellion, and restores eyes to the soul to see in a new light the world, others, and one's destiny.”

To people who may be suffering a lot, or long term, or God may have afflicted them with special things, this story that their suffering can be worthwhile, can be reunited to the cross of Christ, and have enormous meritorious value—this changes everything.

It makes them thank God for the crosses that He sends them. It helps them to see each day in a different way. We see that all the little difficult things that we may do—it's all earning great rewards for us in heaven.

Our Lady leads us to her Son, who has a special love for the sick. Christ went around the place doing good and healing all.

He loved to heal people. While He didn’t heal the whole world, He did heal an awful lot of people.

We see how Christ reaches out to them. We can also see in the people we know, elderly or sick, that Christ is there in this person. “Whenever you did it to one of these little ones, you did it to me” (Matt. 25:40).

It can be a very consoling thought when we reach out in some way to people that we needn't reach out to, or we go the extra mile, or we go out of our way in some way, or maybe we don't get any thanks, or we're not appreciated: “Whenever you did it to one of these little ones, you did it to me.”

Tell Our Lord, We're doing it for you. It's not just for human thanks or human glory.

John Paul liked to say that Christ was sensitive to every human suffering, whether of the body or of the soul. There are many people in the world who are suffering.

We are on the weekend of the hearts, the 14th of February, all around the place, and Valentine's. Everybody's talking about hearts, and we see lovely hearts all drawn beautifully, and they all link up together again.

John Paul II liked to say that our hearts are not like that, because God has taken a piece of our heart, and He's kept it for Himself in heaven. We only get that piece of our heart back when we go to heaven.

When we pray for a while, maybe He gives it back to us for a while as well. But he said we all suffer from a hole in the heart, and that hole can only be filled by God.

Nothing in this world satisfies it. If those Valentine's Day hearts drew the truth, there'd be a big jagged edge missing from all of those hearts.

“Our hearts are restless, Lord, until they rest in you” (St. Augustine, Confessions).

Christ allowed His heart to be fit by a lance on the cross, allowed His heart to be broken, so that He could be like the patron saint of all broken hearts.

Our Lady allowed her heart to be pierced by a spiritual sword, so that she could be there also.

Fulton Sheen says “Only Christ and Our Lady can mend broken hearts, but you've got to give them all the pieces.”

There was an English Lord who was in Nairobi about ten years ago. He came to give a talk at an Ethics Conference at Strathmore University: Lord Alton. He is the main Catholic peer.

In his discourse, he said one thing that was rather interesting. He said, “Only Christianity can change the hearts of men. Governments can't, NGOs can't. Only Christ can, only Christianity.”

This is one of the great powers of the Church, the power to change the hearts of men. We have an inroad into every human heart.

Our Lady has that inroad, the capacity to change hearts with beauty, with truth, and with love. Our Mother is there guiding us to those hearts, that we can give that witness, in our family, in our neighborhood, in the things we do, in the way that we carry the crosses that He gives us, knowing that there will always be sufficient graces, in difficult circumstances, that we can use to draw our friends closer to Him.

We can certainly ask Our Lord to heal our infirmities and resolve our problems. We can ask Him that we might be more docile to His grace, and increase our faith, our hope, our charity.

There were many things initially that Bernadette did not understand. It took quite a while for her to grasp what was taking place. But then, with her correspondence, as she entered a convent, she underwent a lot of sufferings in her life. And she died young, but always happy.

We can put our pains and our sufferings in the hands of God.

“Therefore,” He says, “do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will have anxieties of its own. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble” (Matt. 6:34).

Everybody has a cross to carry. We solve all our problems by thinking about the others, helping that other person to correspond generously to the will of God for them.

One spiritual writer says, “Suffering, which in the eyes of men is so disagreeable, can be a fountain of sanctification and apostolate when it is united to Christ” (Adolphe Tanquerey, The Divinization of Suffering).

It is the great secret of Christianity that we have to communicate to other people: there is an opportunity to co-redeem with Jesus, to be beside Mary on the cross, to atone to their hearts for all the ways in which their hearts suffer.

Many times, when Our Lady appeared, she talked about that heart of Christ’s that was suffering: “Behold, this heart that has loved men so much...and all I get in return are insults. And it is those that are most consecrated to me very often that hurt me most.” These were Christ’s words to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque.

We are called to atone to that heart of Mary, that Immaculate Heart, to offer her things that ease the pain, that say that we’re sorry, that we want to improve our life. We know that Our Mother will give us consolation, she’s Consoler of the Afflicted, Help of the Sick, Help of Christians.

She is always there in all those moments for us to go to her. Mary, Our Lady of Lourdes, may we spread your message with our words and with our actions.

May we foster that devotion to you, which we know you want us to spread around the place, and help many people to find consolation in finding joy in your Immaculate Heart.

I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My Immaculate Mother, St. Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

OLV