By: Father Seán Coyle SSC

The 150th anniversary of the first apparition of Our Lady of Lourdes to St Bernadette Soubirous is 11 February. Pope Benedict hopes to visit Lourdes for the celebrations. 

I remember the smiling face of the young Italian man cheerfully helping to lower Tony into the baths in Lourdes during Easter Week 1991. Tony was very tall but partly disabled and brain-damaged from a car accident in Ireland. The Italian and his compatriots had come to the shrine of the Blessed Mother at their own expense to assist pilgrims, whether disabled or not. And the extraordinary thing about the baths is that you put your clothes back on without drying yourself and don’t feel uncomfortable. I was with a group from Ireland with serious disabilities. I shared a room with Tony, Tom, an older man who had had polio as a child, and Joe, a married man the same age as myself and the leader of our group.

Nature’s ice-breakers

I remember the Easter Vigil in 2001 in the huge underground basilica opened in February 1958 by then Cardinal Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, who became Pope John XXIII in October that year. I was chaplain to the small contingent of 12 representing the Philippines at the international Faith and Light
pilgrimage held every ten year. One of those who helped dramatize one of the Vigil readings was a young woman who had been left in a basurahan in Cebu after birth, Louella Vicente, known as ‘Lala’. She was born with Trisomy 21 (Down’s Syndrome) and raised by the Daughters of Charity in the Asilo in Cebu. They gave her the family name ‘Vicente’ after St Vincent de Paul and ‘Louella’ after St Louise de Marillac, a widow who co-founded the Daughters of Charity with St Vincent. As a young woman Lala went to live in the L’Arche community in Cainta, Rizal.

Lala is one of nature’s ‘icebreakers’ and is a ray of sunshine to all who meet her, though she can have moods too. I was struck by the awesome reality that this young woman from the Philippines who according to the ‘wisdom’ of many would have been better not being born, was helping proclaim the Word of God to thousands of people from all over the world, many of them like herself. I sometimes imagine that her mother was perhaps a student who panicked and left her new-born daughter in a place where someone would rescue her.

The least will be the greatest

Lourdes is a place where people like Lala and Tony are the ‘VIPs’. St Bernadette Soubirous was an illiterate 14-year-old girl when the Blessed Mother first appeared to her near the River Gave on 11 February 1858. For a while her family lived in what had been a jail. I remember when our Irish group visited there I shed tears remembering the awful poverty of many in Dublin, my native city, when I was a child, some living in a disused jail not far from where I grew up.

Statue of St Bernadette

I was in Lourdes twice in 2002 with groups of pilgrims from England, most of them Filipinos working there in order to help their families back home. We were graced to be able to take part in a Mass at the grotto where the Virgin Mary appeared on the feast itself. When I returned in June I celebrated Mass there in Tagalog, with the readings in Cebuano and Hiligaynon.

At all the shrines of the Blessed Mother where the Church has declared that she truly appeared, such as Lourdes and La Salette in France, Fatima in Portugal, Knock in Ireland, Beauraing and Banneux in Belgium, Guadalupe in Mexico, it was always to persons who were poor and ‘unimportant’ in their communities.

Oneness of the Church

There’s a great sense of freedom in Lourdes. There are no ‘requirements’ or things you must do, as there are in some pilgrimages, especially penitential ones. However, everyone attends the Blessed Sacrament procession in the afternoon, when the sick are blessed, and the candlelight Rosary procession at night, where each mystery is led in a different language, reflecting the main linguistic groups present. Pilgrims answer in their own language and there’s a great sense of the universality of the Church. The baths for women and for men are staffed by volunteers like the smiling Italian who helped Tony, giving up their vacation time and paying their own way to be of service to others. Pilgrims who go to Lourdes specifically to take care of the sick, many of them young adults, are known as ‘brancardiers’. Not a few pilgrims spend a night in prayer at the grotto.

Before I made my first pilgrimage to Lourdes, with my late father in August 1971, shortly before I came to the Philippines, I’d heard many lamenting the ‘commercialism’ there. The very large shrine area known as the Domain is a place of prayer. It also has a large park where groups can have picnics and where priests sometimes hear confessions, as we did during the Faith and Light pilgrimage. The so-called ‘commercialism’ consists of the hotels where the more than six million pilgrims who go to Lourdes every year stay, coffee-shops and souvenir stores. Many souvenirs are indeed ‘tacky’ but nobody is forced to buy them. And what pilgrim would want to go home without a pasalubong or two?

Tell me who you are

On the Feast of the Annunciation, 25 March 1858, Mary finally revealed who she was to Bernadette, who asked her four times, ‘Would you be so kind as to tell me who you are?’ Mary answered, ‘Que soy era Immaculada Councepciou’, the local French dialect for ‘I am the Immaculate Conception’. Only four years earlier Blessed Pope Pius IX had proclaimed the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, something that the peasant-girl Bernadette was probably unaware of. The last apparition was on the Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, 16 July.

For me, Lourdes is above all a place where the poor, the sick and the ‘unimportant’, persons like Tony, Lala, Filipino nurses working far from home in England and St Bernadette herself, know that they are important, and loved by our Blessed Mother and our Heavenly Father.

Photos by Fr Tim Finigan at http://the-hermeneutic-of-continuity.blogspot.com

RELATED WEBSITES

The 150th anniversary of the first apparition of Mary to Bernadette will be observed on 11 February.www.lourdes2008.com is the official website for the jubilee celebrations and www.lourdes-france.org that of the Sanctuary. The main website of Faith and Light International is www.foietlumiere.org while www.larche.org is that of L’Arche International. All of these have English versions.