LOURDES

Town on the Gave de Pau River, at the foot of the Pyrenees, southwest France. Since 1912 the See of Tarbes (founded c. 500, perhaps in the 4th century) has been known as the Diocese of Tarbes and Lourdes.

Lourdes was an obscure village until the Blessed Virgin appeared there to the 14-year-old St. Bernadette soubirous 18 times between February 11 and July 16, 1858. It has since become the location of one of the most popular Marian shrines in the world. Bernadette's visits to the grotto of Massabielle on the riverside were accompanied by crowds that reached 20,000 on March 4; only Bernadette, however, saw the visions. After calling for penance on the 24th, the Lady directed Bernadette to drink and wash at a spring which came forth as soon as Bernadette dug (February 25). The water, which now flows at the rate of 32,000 gallons a day, is used for the bath at Lourdes (which is changed twice daily) and is prized as a sacramental by pilgrims. On February 27 and March 2 Bernadette was instructed to have a chapel built and to have people come there in processions. On March 25 the Lady told Bernadette, in the dialect of Lourdes, "I am the Immaculate Conception." The dogma of the immaculate conception had been defined by Pope Pius IX, December 8, 1854. The final apparition occurred on the feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Bernadette, who entered the Sisters of Charity and Christian Instruction at Nevers (1865), died in 1879; she was beatified in 1925 and canonized in 1933.

There was a period of opposition; the grotto and spring were barricaded by the mayor from June to October 1858 "for hygienic reasons." In 1861 the shrine became the property of the See of Tarbes, and in 1862 Bishop Laurence confirmed the apparitions and approved the public cult of Our Lady of Lourdes. Apart from the cures associated with the spring (whose water is chemically the same as Lourdes drinking water), reasons for the approval were the good spiritual effects resulting from the devotion, the evident ecstasy of Bernadette, and the accuracy and veracity of her testimony. In 1862 a marble statue was carved and a Gothic church (in place of a chapel) was begun. In 1871 the first Mass was celebrated in the church, and in 1872 (after the Franco-Prussian War) pilgrims flocked to Lourdes from all parts of France. The church was made a minor basilica and was consecrated by Abp. Guibert of Paris in 1876 in the presence of 100,000 pilgrims, while the statue was crowned by the papal nuncio to France. The increase in the number of pilgrims necessitated another church, the Rosary Basilica with 15 chapels (1883–1901), which became a minor basilica in 1926. Leo XIII, who built a Lourdes grotto in the Vatican gardens, approved an Office and a Mass of Lourdes for the province of Auch (1891), and Pius X extended the feast (February 11) for the whole church (1907). The crypt below the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception and the underground Church of Pope St. Pius X were consecrated by Cardinal Roncalli (later Pope John XXIII) in 1958, a centenary year which attracted six million pilgrims. Two annual pilgrimages, the French national pilgrimage led by the Assumptionists and the Rosary pilgrimage under the Dominicans, date from the 1870s.

Development of the Sanctuary . Each year millions of pilgrims visit Lourdes. They come from every continent, every social background and age-group. The sick are particularly prominent. The first cure at Lourdes was reported in 1858, and in 1861 the first commission pronounced 15 of 100 cures miraculous. Of 5,000 reported cures by the end of 1959, 58 were declared miraculous by the Church, but a number of cures are believed not to have been reported. The cures of organic illnesses include the healing of cancers, tuberculosis, and blindness; cases of neurasthemia or nervous disorders are not considered significant. As many cures derive from the processions and the individual blessings of the sick as from the baths and from private prayers at the grotto. Reported cures are first examined at Lourdes by a medical bureau of physicians (since 1882), and valid cases are asked to return a year later. The medical bureau then forwards its conclusions to the International Medical Commission of Lourdes (in Paris) for confirmation. Approved cases then go to a canonical commission in the diocese of the person cured. The bishop of this see pronounces on the miraculous nature of the cure. The sanctuary publishes a monthly magazine translated from the French into four languages that reports news and current events in Lourdes.

Bibliography: r. p. cros, Histoire de Notre Dame de Lourdes d'après les documents et les témoins, 3 v. (Paris 1925–27). d. c. sharkey, After Bernadette (Milwaukee 1945). b. lebbe, The Soul of Bernadette (Tralee 1946). p. miest, Les 54 miracles de Lourdes au jugement du droit canon, 1858–1958 (Paris 1958). g. siegmund, De miraculis atque sanationibus Lourdensibus (Rome 1960). r. laurentin, Lourdes: Histoire authentique des apparitions de Lourdes, 6 v. (Paris 1961–66). r. harris, Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age (New York 1999). r. laurentin, v. messori, and m. j. furiÓ, Lourdes: crónica de un misterio (Barcelona 1997).

[t. f. casey/eds.]