A hundred thousand pilgrims hear a Pope quote a girl

LOURDES, France, September 14, 2008 AD — Saint Bernadette Soubirous was fourteen. In the winter and spring of 1858 AD, at the grotto of Massabielle at Lourdes, in France, the Blessed Virgin Mary was appearing to her. St. Bernadette called her the Lady.

The parish priest frightened her. Father Dominique Peyramale was a good man, she said afterwards. But she was more afraid of him than of a policeman.

So on March 2, 1858 AD she asked her aunt, Basile Casterot, to come with her. She did not want to go alone. Her aunt was just as frightened. “When I pass that holy man,” Basile Casterot said, “my legs tremble and I shake all over.”

At the priest’s door St. Bernadette gave him the message the Lady had sent her with: “Go and tell the priests that people should come here in procession, and that a chapel should be built here.”

Father Peyramale let her say the whole message before he answered. A procession would only make people who did not believe her laugh, he told her. Either she was lying, or the Lady was a fake. And she should have gone to the Bishop of Tarbes, not to him. St. Bernadette said the Lady had not asked for a procession straight away. As far as she had understood her, it would happen later.

Then the priest told her what would change his mind. 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. He had spoken harshly and she was frightened. Then she said something of her own, something the Lady had never told her to say. “Father, the Lady always asks for a chapel,” St. Bernadette said, “even a very small one.”

The words a Pope read out first

A hundred and fifty years later, a Pope began his homily at Lourdes with that message. It was the morning of September 14, 2008 AD, and Pope Benedict XVI was saying Mass for the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the apparitions of Our Lady at Lourdes. The Mass was on the Prairie, the open meadow across the river Gave from the grotto.

More than a hundred thousand pilgrims stood in the field. The sky was clear after several days of rain and cold.

He had not yet greeted the cardinals and the bishops. He had said nothing about the feast the Church was keeping that day. Only after he had read the message out did he name the girl who had been given it. “This is the message Bernadette received from the ‘beautiful lady’ in the apparition of 2 March 1858,” Pope Benedict XVI said.

Later in the homily he spoke about her again, and this time he said what sort of girl she was. “Bernadette is the eldest daughter of a very poor family, with neither knowledge nor power, and in poor health,” Pope Benedict XVI said. Mary chose that girl, he said. Her message called for conversion, prayer and penance.