Pope tells the sick at Lourdes: Our Lady answered with a smile

LOURDES, September 15, 2008 AD — At the grotto outside Lourdes, Saint Bernadette Soubirous kept asking the Blessed Virgin Mary for her name, and what came back was a smile. Preaching to the sick at Lourdes this week, Pope Benedict XVI said that smile was the answer. It was the first one Our Lady gave her, in the apparition of Wednesday, March 3, 1858 AD, twenty-two days before the name came.

The Mass was on Monday, the memorial of Our Lady of Sorrows, on the esplanade in front of the Rosary basilica. It was the last day of Pope Benedict XVI’s journey to France for the 150th anniversary of the apparitions.

By the beginning of March 1858 AD, St. Bernadette was fourteen, and she had had bad asthma since she was small. The parish priest of Lourdes, Father Dominique Peyramale, had set her two conditions. He would do nothing about the chapel Our Lady had asked for at the grotto until the Blessed Virgin gave her name and made the wild rose bush there flower in the middle of winter.

Pope Benedict XVI began with Mary at the foot of the Cross, where the memorial puts her, and then with her joy in the Resurrection: “The tears shed at the foot of the Cross have been transformed into a smile which nothing can wipe away.” Then he turned to Lourdes: “Here in Lourdes, in the course of the apparition of Wednesday 3 March 1858, Bernadette contemplated this smile of Mary in a most particular way. It was the first response that the Beautiful Lady gave to the young visionary who wanted to know who she was.” He went straight on: “Before introducing herself, some days later, as ‘the Immaculate Conception’, Mary first taught Bernadette to know her smile, this being the most appropriate point of entry into the revelation of her mystery.”

That Wednesday, three thousand people waited at the grotto from seven in the morning, and Our Lady did not appear. After school St. Bernadette heard the call again, went back, and asked once more for the name; the answer was a smile. Days earlier, at the presbytery, Father Peyramale had asked her whether she had ever put the question. “Yes,” she told him, “but when I ask her she bows her head slightly, smiles and gives me no answer.”

The name came on March 25, the feast of the Annunciation. St. Bernadette asked three times. Twice Our Lady bowed her head, smiled and said nothing. The third time St. Bernadette clasped her hands and called herself unworthy of what she was asking, and Our Lady answered in the dialect the girl spoke at home: “Que soy era Immaculada Councepciou” (I am the Immaculate Conception). The priest had his name; the rose bush never flowered.

Pope Benedict XVI then turned from St. Bernadette to the people in front of him: the sick, and the brancardiers (stretcher-bearers) who come from every diocese in France to attend them.

He held up St. Bernadette’s own resolve — “to accept, as Bernadette expressed it, to ‘suffer everything in silence in order to please Jesus’” — and said that to be able to say that, a person must already have travelled a long way with Jesus. Then he gave them a number: “Bernadette herself, in the course of a life that was often marked by sickness, received this sacrament four times.”

The sacrament is the anointing of the sick, given to anyone seriously ill and, above all, to those at the point of death.

The first came in 1860 AD, soon after St. Bernadette entered the hospice of the Sisters of Nevers at Lourdes. She had an attack so severe that the chaplain, Father Pomian, anointed her, and the doctors agreed there was no hope. After the doctors had gone the sisters gave her a spoonful of water from the grotto, and she could speak again at once. The second came in 1862 AD, when her health grew worse again at the hospice.

The third came in 1866 AD, in her first months at the convent of Saint-Gildard at Nevers. Leaving the refectory one evening she vomited blood so heavily that the house doctor said at once there was no hope. Bishop Forcade crossed the town on foot late that night and anointed her. On the stairs afterwards the superior told him St. Bernadette would die without having made her vows, so he turned back and had them pronounced in her name. Unable to speak, she nodded her head. Within two or three days she was out of danger.

The fourth came on March 28, 1879 AD, when she was dying at Saint-Gildard of a knee tumour and tuberculosis of the lungs. Her confessor anointed her. Before he gave her Communion, St. Bernadette asked the superior and the other sisters to forgive her, in a voice so strong that everyone in the room was astonished. She died three weeks later, on April 16, 1879 AD, at thirty-five.

Pope Benedict XVI ended the homily with part of the prayer to Mary proposed for the jubilee celebration: “Because you are the smile of God… Because you chose Bernadette in her lowliness… Our Lady of Lourdes, with our brothers and sisters whose hearts and bodies are in pain, we pray to you!” Later in the same Mass he administered the anointing of the sick.