On 25 March 1858, in a damp grotto on the edge of a small market town in the French Pyrenees, a fourteen-year-old girl asked the lady who had been appearing to her, for the sixteenth time, who she was. The lady joined her hands, looked up, and answered in the local dialect, words that the girl, who could not read or write, repeated all the way home so she would not forget them.
Where she said it
Lourdes sits at the foot of the Pyrenees in southern France. In 1858 it was a town of about four thousand, mostly poor, mostly working in the small mills along the river. The Soubirous family was poorer than most. They had once owned a flour mill but had lost everything by the time Bernadette, the eldest of four surviving children, was fourteen. They were living in a single damp room that had once been the town jail.
On the cold morning of 11 February, Bernadette went with her sister and a friend to gather firewood along the river Gave. She stopped at a small natural cave at the rock of Massabielle while the others crossed the stream. There, in the niche above the cave, she saw a young woman in white, with a blue sash and a rose at each foot, smiling at her. The woman said nothing that day. She only made the sign of the cross and prayed the rosary with Bernadette.
The lady appeared eighteen times in all, between February and July of that year. She asked Bernadette to come for fifteen days. She asked for prayer for sinners. She asked for a chapel to be built. She asked Bernadette to dig in the dirt where a spring then appeared, the spring that now flows under the basilica and has been carried home by millions in small bottles.
For weeks the lady did not say her name. When the local priest demanded one, Bernadette asked, and was told to wait. Then on 25 March, the feast of the Annunciation, the lady answered.
What she said
Over the eighteen visits, Mary said only a handful of things, and she said them simply. They are kept by the Church almost word for word, the way Bernadette repeated them.
Will you do me the kindness of coming here for fifteen days?
18 February 1858
I do not promise to make you happy in this world, but in the next.
18 February 1858
Penance, penance, penance. Pray for sinners.
24 February 1858
Go and drink of the water of the spring and wash in it.
25 February 1858
Go and tell the priests to build a chapel here, and to come here in procession.
2 March 1858
Que soy era Immaculada Councepciou.
25 March 1858, in the local Occitan dialect of the Pyrenees
I am the Immaculate Conception.
The words sound Spanish to modern ears, but they are not. They are Occitan, the old language of southern France, in the form spoken in the Pyrenean village where Bernadette lived. She did not really speak French. Mary spoke to her in her own poor mountain tongue.
What she meant
Bernadette did not understand the words. She walked the whole way back to the parish house repeating them aloud, in the Bigourdan dialect, so she would not lose them. When she arrived at the priest’s door she said the sentence and burst into tears. She did not know what it meant.
The priest did. Four years earlier, in 1854, Pope Pius IX had defined as dogma what the Church had believed for centuries, that Mary, from the first moment of her existence, had been preserved free from the stain of original sin. The phrase “the Immaculate Conception” was new in the form Pius used it. It was a doctrine, an idea, a heavy theological word.
Now a poor girl who could barely write her own name had come to the rectory and said the words herself, and said that the lady had given them to her as a name. Not as a doctrine. As a name. I am she.
That is the strange and beautiful thing about Lourdes. Mary did not say I am the woman to whom this happened. She said I am that mystery. Her whole being is that grace. She does not have the Immaculate Conception. She is it.
She does not name her Son once at Lourdes. Not in any of the eighteen visits. And yet everything she asks for points at Him.
The water from the spring is like the water that flowed from His side on the cross, the water of baptism, the washing that begins the Christian life. The chapel she asks for is a place for Mass, where He gives Himself again. The procession is the people walking together toward Him. Penance and prayer for sinners is the same call He preached in Galilee: Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand. The happiness she does not promise in this world, but promises in the next, is the happiness of being with Him forever.
Even her own name, the Immaculate Conception, is only true because of Him. She is the first fruit of His salvation. Her sinlessness is His grace, given to her ahead of time, so that she could carry Him. To meet her at Lourdes is to be brought, by her, to her Son.
Voices that came after
Sixty years after Lourdes, a young Polish friar named Maximilian Kolbe, later martyred at Auschwitz in 1941, read everything he could about Bernadette and the words she carried home. He built his whole spirituality around them.
The Immaculate is not a property of Mary. She is the Immaculate. Her being is to be without sin, full of grace, given entirely to God.
Saint Maximilian Kolbe
He founded a movement, the Militia Immaculatae, on this insight, that to give yourself to Mary is to give yourself to the one being who has never resisted God for an instant, who has been turned toward Him from the first moment, and who carries that grace for the rest of us.
Why it still matters
We live in a time that is very tired of itself, very aware of its faults, very unable to imagine a creature unwounded.
Lourdes is the answer. There is one human being who was kept whole. Not by her own effort, but by grace, and from the very first moment, because her Yes to God was already prepared in her. She is what the rest of us were meant to be. She is the proof that God can do it.
To pray to her under this name is to put yourself in the hands of the one creature in whom God’s intention for humanity was never broken. She does not look at our wounds and despair. She looks at her Son and asks. He listens.
A line to carry into the week
Pray for sinners.