Our Lady of Lourdes

Everything known about the apparitions comes from Bernadette; she alone saw the Lady. The Sanctuary of Lourdes keeps the chronology, and it is less dramatic and more convincing than most retellings. The Lady was silent at most of the eighteen visits. What she said, she said briefly.

• 1st, Thursday, February 11. Gathering wood with her sister and a friend, Bernadette hears a sound like a gust of wind and sees a lady in white, with a blue sash and a yellow rose on each foot. She prays the Rosary; the Lady prays with her and disappears.
• 2nd, February 14. Bernadette throws holy water at the figure, as a test. The Lady smiles and bows her head.
• 3rd, February 18. The Lady speaks for the first time. Asked to write her name, she says it is not necessary, and asks Bernadette to come to the grotto for fifteen days. She adds, in the Sanctuary’s words, that she does not promise to make her happy in this world, but in the next.
• 7th, February 23. Before about a hundred and fifty people, the Lady tells Bernadette a secret meant for her alone.
• 8th, February 24. The message is penance: pray to God for sinners, and kiss the ground as penance for them.
• 9th, February 25. Told to drink at the spring and wash there, Bernadette scratches at the ground and drinks muddy water at the fourth try. That is the spring.
• 12th, March 1. A priest is present for the first time. That night Catherine Latapie bathes her dislocated arm in the spring; her cure is the first the Church would recognise.
• 13th, March 2. “Go and tell the priests that people should come here in procession, and that a chapel should be built here.” The parish priest, Fr. Peyramale, wants one thing first: her name.
• 16th, Thursday, March 25, the feast of the Annunciation. The Lady gives her name (below).
• 17th, April 7. A doctor watches the flame of Bernadette’s candle play around her hand for a long time without burning it.
• 18th, Friday, July 16. The grotto is fenced off. Bernadette kneels on the far bank of the river and sees her one last time: “never have I seen her so beautiful.”

Words quoted from the apparitions are our translations of the Sanctuary’s French. The bishop of Tarbes, Bertrand-Sévère Laurence, ran a commission of inquiry for more than three years. On January 18, 1862, he declared the apparitions worthy of belief, and recognised the first seven cures the same day.

For three weeks Fr. Peyramale had refused to take the Lady seriously until she gave a name. On March 25, 1858, Bernadette asked again. By her own account the Lady raised her eyes to heaven, joined her hands, and said in the Pyrenean dialect: Que soy era Immaculada Councepciou, “I am the Immaculate Conception.”

Bernadette ran back to the presbytery repeating the words so as not to lose them. She did not know what they meant. The phrase was a theological term, and Pius IX had defined the doctrine only four years before, on December 8, 1854; it was not something a girl whose memory, the Sanctuary says, “refused to retain the abstract phrases” of the catechism would think to say. It shook the priest more than any vision had.

Two things are worth getting right. The title is about Mary’s own conception, preserved from original sin from its first moment, not about the conception of Jesus; see the Immaculate Conception for what the doctrine says and where it comes from. And the Church does not rest the doctrine on Lourdes. It was defined before Bernadette was heard of. Lourdes is received as a confirmation of it, never its source.

More than seven thousand cures have been declared at Lourdes since 1858. The Church has recognised seventy-two of them as miraculous. The Sanctuary’s own list online still stops at seventy, with Sr. Bernadette Moriau of Beauvais, recognised on February 11, 2018. Two have been added since:

• The seventy-first: John Traynor, a Liverpool sailor wounded at Gallipoli, cured of epilepsy and paralysis on the archdiocese’s pilgrimage of 1923. After an English member of the International Medical Committee reviewed his file in the Lourdes archives, the Archbishop of Liverpool declared his cure a miracle in December 2024. He was the first person from England to be recognised.
• The seventy-second: Antonia Raco, an Italian woman from Basilicata diagnosed with a progressive neurodegenerative disease, cured at the baths in 2009. The committee voted in November 2024, seventeen of twenty-one in favour, and her bishop, Vincenzo Carmine Orofino of Tursi-Lagonegro, recognised the miracle on April 16, 2025.

The process runs in three stages, and only the last is the Church’s.

1. The Medical Bureau. Founded in 1883 so that no one would leave Lourdes claiming to be cured without a medical assessment. A permanent doctor receives each declaration, and the doctors present at Lourdes that day examine it together. Most go no further.
2. The International Medical Committee of Lourdes. About twenty specialists, of different religious beliefs, study the file, sometimes for years, and vote on whether the cure is unexplained in the present state of medical knowledge. A two-thirds majority is required.
3. The bishop. The result goes to the bishop of the diocese where the person lives. It is he, not the doctors and not the Sanctuary, who decides whether to declare a miracle.

The criteria go back to Cardinal Prospero Lambertini, later Pope Benedict XIV, and are the same the Vatican uses for canonisations. The illness must be serious, with a poor prognosis; organic, with objective evidence; and not treated by anything the cure could be credited to. The cure must be sudden, complete, with every function restored, and lasting rather than a remission. Psychological and psychiatric illnesses are not recognised under these criteria, as the Sanctuary explains, not because they cannot be healed but because a cure cannot be proved objectively.

Why so strict? The Catechism counts the miracles of Christ and the saints among the signs that make faith reasonable (CCC 156), and it also warns that his miracles were “not intended to satisfy people’s curiosity or desire for magic” (CCC 548). A shrine that certified everything would serve the second and ruin the first.

No, and the Sanctuary says so itself. Lourdes water comes from the spring Bernadette uncovered on February 25, 1858, and has “no therapeutic properties or specific properties”; analysed in 1858, it turned out to be ordinary drinking water. It is “not holy water: water from the Spring can only become holy through the action of a priest.” For what holy water is, and how the Church blesses and uses it, see our guide to holy water.

Bernadette put the point better than anyone. “We take the water like medicine,” she said, but “we must have faith, we must pray: this water will have no virtue without faith!” The water is a sign, like the pool Jesus sent the blind man to: “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam.” The washing was the man’s obedience, not the pool’s power.

The Catechism names the mistake to avoid: to attribute the efficacy of prayers or sacred signs “to their mere external performance, apart from the interior dispositions that they demand, is to fall into superstition” (CCC 2111). Keeping a bottle of Lourdes water at home, blessing yourself with it and praying for the sick is devotion. Treating it as a remedy that works whatever you believe is not.

How to get Lourdes water. It is free from the Sanctuary’s taps and fountains and cannot be sold. For water sent from Lourdes, the Sanctuary asks you to contact the pilgrimage organisation nearest you.

February 11, the date of the first apparition, is the optional memorial of Our Lady of Lourdes. Pius X extended the feast of the apparition to the whole Church in 1907.

In a letter of May 13, 1992, John Paul II instituted the World Day of the Sick, to be kept on the same day from February 1993 onward, as “a special time of prayer and sharing, of offering one’s suffering for the good of the Church and of reminding everyone to see in his sick brother or sister the face of Christ.” He chose the date for the shrine he called “a temple of human suffering.” Many parishes celebrate the anointing of the sick that day, the sacrament of the letter of James: “Is any among you sick? Let him call for the presbyters of the Church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord.”

The Church is honest about what prayer for healing can and cannot expect. “Even the most intense prayers do not always obtain the healing of all illnesses,” the Catechism says; Paul had to learn that “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (CCC 1508). Illness, it adds, “can lead to anguish, self-absorption, sometimes even despair and revolt against God,” and it can also lead a person back to him (CCC 1501). Lourdes holds both. For praying through an illness of your own or of someone you love, see how to pray for healing and the patron saints of healing.

Marie-Bernarde Soubirous was born on January 7, 1844, at the Boly mill in Lourdes, the eldest child of a miller and his wife who, the Sanctuary notes, had married for love. Ten happy years were followed by a long slide into poverty. By 1858 the family was poor, she was small for her age and asthmatic, and at fourteen she could neither read nor write. She made her First Communion on June 3, 1858, in the middle of the apparitions.

She never embellished her account, and she refused every gift. She would not bless rosaries (“I don’t wear a stole”) or sell medals (“I’m not a merchant”). In 1866 she left Lourdes for good and joined the Sisters of Charity at Nevers, where she said, “I came here to hide myself.” Sister Marie-Bernard nursed the sick, then became one of them, and died on April 16, 1879, aged thirty-five.

Pius XI beatified her in 1925 and canonised her on December 8, 1933, the feast of the Immaculate Conception. The Sanctuary is careful about why: she was proclaimed a saint “not for having been chosen for the Apparitions, but for the way in which she responded to that grace.” Her body lies in a glass reliquary in the convent chapel at Nevers. It was exhumed in 1909, 1919 and 1925; the Church speaks of it as incorrupt, while the doctor who examined it in 1919 described it as “practically mummified.” Since 1925 her face and hands have been covered with wax.

They are the two best-known Marian apparitions, and they are routinely mixed up.

• Lourdes: southwest France, 1858. One visionary, Bernadette, aged fourteen. Eighteen apparitions from February 11 to July 16. The Lady names herself the Immaculate Conception. The message is prayer and penance for sinners; the sign is a spring, and the shrine became a place of the sick. Declared worthy of belief by the bishop of Tarbes in 1862.
• Fatima: central Portugal, 1917. Three shepherd children, Lúcia dos Santos and her cousins Francisco and Jacinta Marto. Six apparitions from May 13 to October 13, ending with the “miracle of the sun.” The Lady names herself the Lady of the Rosary. Declared worthy of belief by the bishop of Leiria on October 13, 1930.

The “three secrets” people search for belong to Fatima: Lúcia revealed two in her memoirs, and the Holy See published the third on June 26, 2000. At Lourdes there is only the secret told to Bernadette at the seventh apparition, for her alone, which she never disclosed and nobody wrote down.

One thing is the same. Neither is an article of faith. The Church calls apparitions “private” revelations, which “do not belong … to the deposit of faith” and are there not to add to Christ’s revelation “but to help live more fully by it in a certain period of history” (CCC 67). A Catholic may doubt Lourdes and remain a Catholic in good standing. Most who go there find that beside the point.

There is no prayer to Our Lady of Lourdes, or to anyone, that obliges a miracle. Versions that circulate as a “miracle prayer” with a promise attached are the kind of thing CCC 2111 warns against. What the Church offers instead is the prayer above, a novena from February 2 to 10, the Rosary Bernadette was praying at the first apparition (see how to pray the Rosary), and the words Mary herself speaks in the Gospel about her son: “Whatever he says to you, do it.”

The shortest prayer of Lourdes is the one Bernadette was given, and the one the Miraculous Medal had carried since 1830: “O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee.” A longer prayer of our own, addressed to God and asking Mary’s prayers, follows.