+ Today we celebrate the fact of the apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary to Bernadette Soubrious at Lourdes, France, on the northern slopes of the Pyrenees Mountains. Between February 11 and July 16, 1858, Mary appeared to fourteen year old Bernadette at the grotto of Massabielle, eighteen times. The young girl was instructed by the apparition to bathe and drink from a spring that began to flow the following day. Since then the bath at Lourdes has been associated with miraculous healings. The site of the apparitions attracts over three million pilgrims a year. Of some five thousand reported cures at least fifty-eight have been declared miraculous by church officials. In 1907 Pope Pius X made the feast of Our Lady of Lourdes a feast of the universal Church.
The message we can glean from this feast today is the comfort and peace that God wishes his ailing and troubled people to have access to – like that of a mother nursing and tending her infant child, like a father who wants to provide all that is necessary for the health and welfare of his children. And so Mary agrees to be a messenger of hope and healing – pointing all the while not to her as object of adoration, but to her Son and their Spirit as agents of transformation and healing and well-being.
In the gospel passage we see pictured the wedding feast at Cana where Mary tells the stewards to do whatever he tells them so that a good result could be forthcoming. Those were Mary's last recorded words in Scripture. And this is her message to this day: DO WHATEVE JESUS TELLS YOU! But we must remember that at these particular apparitions at Lourdes, Mary announced to Bernadette that she was the Immaculate Conception: she was God's favored daughter, destined to become the Mother of her own Redeemer: Jesus, the Lord. While not holding the same authority as Scripture, this apparitional announcement is still held in high regard by the Church as far as piecing together a more complete picture of salvation history. Everyone knew that Bernadette – a poor peasant girl – could not have made up such a term as Immaculate Conception on her own, Mary would have had to have said this to her for her to be able to repeat it to her bishop, and to the Church for all time!
Sometimes at prayer with and to Mary, she might say things to us, make suggestions and give motherly advice that only she can give – and though not necessarily apparitional in nature or founded in scripture, they are to be held in high regard by us because they were specially chosen words given at a particular time for a particular reason: the increase of our health, well-being and groundedness in the faith of Christ her Son at this particular moment!
Hail, Mary! Hail, full of grace! Hail, wondrous Immaculate Conception – splendor of God's Creation!
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