A girl asked for a name, and got a smile

LOURDES, September 15, 2008 AD — On Wednesday, March 3, 1858 AD, three thousand people stood at the grotto outside Lourdes from seven in the morning. Our Lady did not appear. Saint Bernadette Soubirous was fourteen that March. She had one question she kept asking the Blessed Virgin Mary, and she had never got an answer to it. She wanted to know her name.

Father Dominique Peyramale, the parish priest of Lourdes, had set her two conditions. He would do nothing about the chapel Our Lady had asked for at the grotto until both of them happened. The Blessed Virgin had to give her name, and the wild rose bush at the grotto had to flower in the middle of winter.

After school that Wednesday St. Bernadette heard the call again. She went back to the grotto on her own and asked once more for the name. The answer was a smile.

Days earlier, at the priest’s house, Father Peyramale had asked her whether she had ever put that question to Our Lady. “Yes,” she told him, “but when I ask her she bows her head slightly, smiles and gives me no answer.”

The name came twenty-two days later, on March 25, the feast of the Annunciation. St. Bernadette asked three times. The first time, Our Lady bowed her head, smiled and said nothing. The second time she did the same.

The third time St. Bernadette put her hands together and said she was not worthy to be asking. Then Our Lady answered, in the dialect the girl spoke at home: “Que soy era Immaculada Councepciou” (I am the Immaculate Conception).

St. Bernadette ran the whole way back, repeating words she did not understand.

The priest had his name. The rose bush never flowered.

One hundred and fifty years later

This week Pope Benedict XVI came to Lourdes, one hundred and fifty years after the apparitions at the grotto. On Monday he said Mass outdoors at Lourdes for people who are sick. It was the last day of his journey to France.

Preaching to them, Pope Benedict XVI said that smile was the answer. “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,” he said. “It was the first response that the Beautiful Lady gave to the young visionary who wanted to know who she was.” Before she gave her name, he told them, Mary first taught St. Bernadette to know her smile.