Our Lady of Lourdes
Patron of the sick
On 11 February 1858, in the cold grotto of Massabielle outside the Pyrenean town of Lourdes, a fourteen-year-old miller's daughter named Bernadette Soubirous saw a lady of dazzling beauty standing in a niche of rock. Over the course of eighteen apparitions ending on the feast of the Annunciation the lady identified herself in the local Gascon dialect: 'Que soy era Immaculada Councepciou' — 'I am the Immaculate Conception' — confirming the dogma defined by Pius IX only four years earlier. She asked for prayer and penance for sinners and directed Bernadette to a hidden spring whose waters have since been associated with more than seventy medically inexplicable cures. Lourdes is today one of the world's great places of pilgrimage, especially for the sick.