The story of Lourdes
A little girl collecting firewood
Lourdes is a town in southwest France, in the foothills of the Pyrenees.
In February 1858, a 14-year-old peasant girl ventured out from her home in the town to gather some firewood. Joined by her sister and a friend, she went to the town's dump, a cave by the river where farmers would take their pigs. There she saw a ‘small young lady’, in a niche in the rock, who would appear to her in this place eighteen times that year.
The ‘beautiful lady’ asked the girl – Bernadette Soubirous was her name – to return to the grotto, pray to God, uncover a spring of water and wash in it, bring the priests and townspeople in procession to the grotto, and build a chapel on the rock.
‘Que soy era immaculada concepciou’
Hundreds of people came to see Bernadette praying and talking to the lady. Bernadette kept asking the lady who she was, and at the sixteenth appearance, the lady answered Bernadette's request. In her native Occitan, she said: ‘I am the Immaculate Conception’.
Only four years earlier, the Church had declared it as dogma that the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God, was born free of original sin – that is, the doctrine of Immaculate Conception. It was incredible that an insignificant peasant girl from an insignificant little town should know the phrase – and everyone came to believe what they had suspected: that the lady in the rock who appeared to Bernadette was Mary.
‘Come here in procession and build a chapel’
Ever since those events of 1858, pilgrims have travelled to Lourdes to answer Mary's requests – to pray, bathe in the waters, process to the grotto, and visit the three basilicas and nineteen other places of worship that constitute the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes. No sooner had Bernadette uncovered the water in the grotto than people reported miraculous healings from it. The Church recognises 70 miracles that have taken place in Lourdes, unexplainable by today’s medical science.
Five million pilgrims visit the shrine each year. Many of them are sick or disabled, brought to Lourdes by pilgrimage groups or their family and friends. During the day, pilgrims might visit the basilicas, attend Mass, pray the rosary, and bathe in the waters. In the evening, they might join the candelit procession, when the statue of the Virgin Mary is processed around the Sanctuary.
All this requires volunteers - volunteers to help pilgrims using wheelchairs on and off their trains and aeroplanes; volunteers to help guide pilgrims at the baths; volunteers to marshal crowds at processions and services; volunteers to provide a smile of welcome and friendship to all those who come to Lourdes.
That's where we – the Wimbledon College Lourdes Hospitalité – come in.