Our Lady of Lourdes

Between February 11 and July 16, 1858, the Blessed Virgin appeared eighteen times to Bernadette Soubirous, a fourteen-year-old miller's daughter, in a grotto along the river Gave near Lourdes in the French Pyrenees. The lady, dressed in white with a blue sash and a yellow rose on each foot, spoke in the local Gascon dialect and identified herself with words that stunned the village: "I am the Immaculate Conception" — a dogma defined by Pius IX just four years earlier, of which the uneducated girl knew nothing.

At the lady's direction, Bernadette scratched the muddy ground of the grotto and a spring welled up — a spring that has flowed continuously ever since. The waters of Lourdes have become the most famous healing shrine in Christianity: the Church has recognized seventy miracles at Lourdes through a rigorous medical bureau, though the millions who bathe in the waters each year come seeking not only bodily healing but the deeper conversion the Virgin repeatedly asked for.

Lourdes is the Church's answer to the modern conceit that faith is for the strong-minded. The Virgin did not appear to a theologian but to a girl who could barely read, in a damp cave, asking for penance and prayer. Bernadette spent the rest of her short life as a Sister of Charity at Nevers, suffering chronic illness and obscurity. "I am not charged with convincing you," she told skeptics. "I am charged with telling you."