A Pope reads out the errand a fourteen-year-old was given at Lourdes

LOURDES, France, September 14, 2008 AD — Pope Benedict XVI began his homily this morning with a sentence that is not his. He had not yet greeted the cardinals and the bishops, or said a word about the feast the Church keeps today. First he read out the errand a girl of fourteen was given at the grotto here: “Go and tell the priests that people should come here in procession, and that a chapel should be built here.” Then he said who had been given it, and when. “This is the message Bernadette received from the ‘beautiful lady’ in the apparition of 2 March 1858.”

The Mass marked the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the apparitions of Our Lady at Lourdes. It was celebrated on the Prairie, the open meadow across the river Gave from the grotto of Massabielle. More than a hundred thousand pilgrims stood in the field, under a clear sky after several days of rain and cold across the region. Jeanne, a pilgrim of seventy from Saint-Étienne, said of the Pope: “He is a man of great depth and I feel close to him. He may not be as telegenic as John Paul, but he has a deep faith.”

In the winter and spring of 1858 AD, at the grotto of Massabielle, the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to Saint Bernadette Soubirous, who was then fourteen. The errand cost her at once. St. Bernadette was frightened of the parish priest of Lourdes, Father Dominique Peyramale; she said afterwards that though he was a good man she was more afraid of him than of a policeman. On March 2, 1858 AD she asked her aunt, Basile Casterot, to come with her to the presbytery, because she did not want to go alone. The aunt was as frightened as she was. “When I pass that holy man,” Basile Casterot said at the time, “my legs tremble and I shake all over.”

Father Peyramale heard her out and told her that a procession would only make unbelievers laugh. Either she was lying, he said, or the Lady was a counterfeit. And she should have been sent to the Bishop of Tarbes, not to him. St. Bernadette answered that the Lady had not asked for a procession at once, and that if she had understood her rightly she was speaking of the future. Then the priest named his condition: he would believe her, and go with her to Massabielle, if the Lady made the wild rose tree at the grotto flower in front of the crowd. His harshness frightened her, and she answered with a sentence the Lady had never given her to carry. “Father, the Lady always asks for a chapel,” St. Bernadette said, “even a very small one.”

On the Prairie this morning, the Pope went straight on from that sentence to what has followed it. “For 150 years, pilgrims have never ceased to come to the grotto of Massabielle to hear the message of conversion and hope which is addressed to them,” he said. “And we have done the same; here we are this morning at the feet of Mary, the Immaculate Virgin, eager to learn from her alongside little Bernadette.”

The Mass fell on the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, and the Pope preached the feast. Then he brought it back to the grotto. “It is significant that, during the first apparition to Bernadette, Mary begins the encounter with the sign of the Cross,” he said. “More than a simple sign, it is an initiation into the mysteries of the faith that Bernadette receives from Mary.”

St. Bernadette gave her own account of that first day. She could not make the sign of the Cross until Our Lady had made it first. “When I attempted to begin the rosary and tried to lift my hand to my forehead my arm remained paralysed, and it was only after the Lady had signed herself that I could do the same,” she said of February 11, 1858 AD.

Later in the homily the Pope came back to St. Bernadette. “Bernadette is the eldest daughter of a very poor family, with neither knowledge nor power, and in poor health,” he said. Mary chose her, he said, to carry a message of conversion, prayer and penance. He then quoted Jesus: “What you have hidden from the wise and understanding, you have revealed to babes.”