- The Medical Bureau
- Founded in 1883 by Dr. Georges-Fernand Dunot de Saint-Maclou at the request of Fr. Rémi Sempé, so that no one who believed he had been cured would leave Lourdes without a medical examination. The Bureau gathers the records, checks for other explanations, and decides whether a cure is unexpected enough to study further.
- The International Medical Committee
- The International Medical Committee of Lourdes (CMIL), about thirty physicians and specialists, examines the file against the medical knowledge of the day. It can only say whether a cure is complete, lasting, sudden, and unexplained by medicine, using criteria first set out by Prospero Lambertini, the future Pope Benedict XIV.
- The bishop
- Doctors do not declare miracles. The file goes to the bishop of the diocese where the healed person lives, and only he can declare, in the name of the Church, that the cure is a sign from God.
Pillar II · Apparitions · France, 1858
Our Lady of Lourdes
In 1858 a poor, sickly girl of fourteen, gathering firewood by a river in the Pyrenees, saw a young Lady in a hollow of the rock. Over eighteen apparitions the Lady asked for prayer and penance, uncovered a spring, and at last gave her name: “I am the Immaculate Conception.”
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At a glance
| Place | The Grotto of Massabielle, on the banks of the Gave river, Lourdes, France |
|---|---|
| Dates | Eighteen apparitions, from February 11 to July 16, 1858. The Lady gave her name on March 25, 1858, the feast of the Annunciation. |
| Seer | Bernadette Soubirous (14), the eldest child of a destitute miller's family. She later joined the Sisters of Charity of Nevers and died there on April 16, 1879, at 35. Beatified by Pius XI in 1925 and canonized by him on December 8, 1933. |
| Church judgment | Recognized by the Bishop of Tarbes, Bertrand-Sévère Laurence, in a pastoral letter of January 18, 1862, after a commission of inquiry he set up in 1858. He judged that the apparition “possesses all the characteristics of truth and that the faithful may believe in it with certainty,” and on the same day declared seven cures miraculous. Leo XIII approved a proper Mass and Office, and St. Pius X extended the feast to the whole Church in 1907. Recognized long before the 2024 norms. |
| Feast | February 11, Our Lady of Lourdes (optional memorial in the universal calendar), also the World Day of the Sick, instituted by St. John Paul II in 1992. St. Bernadette, April 16 (February 18 in France). |
| Pilgrimage | The Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes, with the Grotto, the spring and the baths, one of the great places of pilgrimage for the sick. Bernadette's body rests at the convent of Saint-Gildard in Nevers. |
| Weight | Approved private revelation: Catholics may accept it with prudent devotion but are not bound to believe it (CCC 67). |
What happened
On Thursday, February 11, 1858, Bernadette went with her sister and a friend to Massabielle “to collect bones and dead wood.” Left behind at the river, she looked up at the grotto. “I saw a lady dressed in white, she wore a white dress, and equally white veils, a blue belt and a yellow rose on each foot.” Bernadette made the Sign of the Cross and prayed the Rosary with her.
On February 18, when Bernadette held out pen and paper and asked the Lady to write her name, the Lady answered, “It is not necessary,” and said: “I do not promise to make you happy in this world but in the other. Would you be kind enough to come here for a fortnight?” Crowds began to follow Bernadette. The police questioned her, and the parish priest, Fr. Dominique Peyramale, told her to ask the Lady's name and to ask that the wild rose at the grotto bloom in winter.
On March 25, after asking several times, Bernadette received the answer in the dialect of Lourdes: “Que soy era Immaculada Concepciou” (“I am the Immaculate Conception”).* She did not know what the words meant. She repeated them all the way to the presbytery so as not to forget them. Pius IX had defined the dogma of the Immaculate Conception less than four years before. The last apparition came on July 16, 1858, the feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, when the grotto had been fenced off and Bernadette saw the Lady from across the river.
A note on the spellingBernadette spoke the Occitan dialect of Lourdes, which had no fixed spelling in her day, so her words appear in several forms. This page follows the spelling used by the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes on its own site, Que soy era Immaculada Concepciou, since it is the source quoted here. The older form Councepciou, which tries to show how the word was pronounced, is also common and is just as correct; the meaning is the same.
Bernadette never claimed the spring or the healings as her own. She asked for no privileges, entered religious life at Nevers, and bore long illness with patience. The words of the Lady are quoted from the official site of the Sanctuary of Lourdes.
What Our Lady asked
Penance for sinners
On February 24: “Penance! Penance! Penance! Pray to God for sinners. Kiss the ground as an act of penance for sinners!”
Drink at the spring
On February 25, as Bernadette told it: “She told me to go, drink of the spring.” She dug in the mud and at the fourth attempt was able to drink. When the crowd thought her mad, she replied: “It is for sinners.”
Come in procession, build a chapel
On March 2: “Go and tell the priests that people are to come here in procession and to build a chapel here.”
Pray
At almost every apparition Bernadette prayed the Rosary with the Lady. The messages are few; the prayer is constant.
Nothing at Lourdes is about the end of the world. It is about sinners, the sick and the poor, and a mother who asks her children to turn back to God.
The spring and the healings
The spring Bernadette uncovered on February 25 still flows at the grotto. Pilgrims drink the water and bathe in it, and from the beginning people have reported cures. The Church has never treated the water as magic. It is a sign, like the water of baptism, of the grace God gives to those who come to him with faith.
- The count
- As of October 18, 2026, the Sanctuary's official list gives 72 healings recognized as miraculous by the Church, out of more than 7,000 cures reported since the apparitions. The first seven were recognized by Bishop Laurence on January 18, 1862.
- The most recent
- The 72nd is Antonia Raco, an Italian woman healed of a degenerative neurological disease during a pilgrimage in 2009. After the CMIL's favorable vote in November 2024, her bishop, Vincenzo Carmine Orofino of Tursi-Lagonegro, recognized the miracle on April 16, 2025.
- Why so few
- The standard is deliberately strict. Countless other graces of healing, peace and conversion are never counted, and the Church does not need to count them.
Lourdes and the Book of Revelation
Lourdes does not interpret Scripture for us. It echoes it.
- The woman at enmity with the serpent. “I will put enmity between you and the woman” (Genesis 3:15). The Catechism calls this the first announcement “of a battle between the serpent and the Woman” (CCC 410). The Immaculate Conception means that this enmity was total from the first moment: the serpent never had any hold on her.
- “I am the Immaculate Conception.” On December 8, 1854, in the bull Ineffabilis Deus, Pius IX defined that “the most Blessed Virgin Mary was, from the first moment of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege of almighty God and by virtue of the merits of Jesus Christ, Saviour of the human race, preserved immune from all stain of original sin” (as quoted in CCC 491). The Lady did not say “I was immaculately conceived” but “I am the Immaculate Conception,” as if it were her name. She was greeted the same way by the angel: “Hail, favored one!” (Luke 1:28).
- The woman clothed with the sun. The great sign of Revelation 12:1 is a woman whom the dragon cannot touch. Bernadette's Lady, all in white with a blue belt, speaks to a world that the same ancient serpent (Revelation 12:9) still troubles, and she points it to her Son.
- The river of life. “Then the angel showed me the river of life-giving water, sparkling like crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb” (Revelation 22:1), and “the leaves of the trees serve as medicine for the nations” (Revelation 22:2). The spring of Lourdes is a small sign of that river.
- Let the one who thirsts come. “Let the one who thirsts come forward, and the one who wants it receive the gift of life-giving water” (Revelation 22:17). “She told me to go, drink of the spring,” Bernadette said of the Lady.
Read with careLourdes is sometimes presented as a place of guaranteed cures. It is not. Most pilgrims who come sick go home sick, and many of them say they received something greater: peace, courage, reconciliation. A recognized miracle is a sign pointing to God, not a promise for every case. And as with every approved apparition, Lourdes adds nothing to the faith; it calls us back to the Gospel (CCC 67).
For reflection
What does penance look like for me?
Bernadette was asked to kiss the ground and drink muddy water for sinners, and the crowd laughed. Is there a small, hidden act of penance I could offer this week for someone who is far from God?
Sources
- Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes (official site), The apparitions, The recognition of the Lourdes apparitions, Miraculous healings and The recognition of a miracle
- Sanctuary of Lourdes, The Medical Bureau
- Bishop Bertrand-Sévère Laurence of Tarbes, pastoral letter of January 18, 1862, as quoted by the Sanctuary
- Pius IX, Ineffabilis Deus (December 8, 1854)
- Vatican Radio, “Our Lady of Lourdes” (February 27, 2012), on the history of the feast
- Solène Tadié, “The Story of Lourdes' 72nd Recognized Miracle”, CNA / National Catholic Register (July 26, 2025)
- Catechism of the Catholic Church 67, 410, 491