This year marks the 160th anniversary of when Bernadette Soubirous announced to fellow villagers in the French town of Lourdes that she was experiencing visions of the Mother of God. An understandably sceptical local community at first didn’t believe the girl who would go on to be known the world over as St Bernadette of…
Lourdes: 160 years of healing In our modern day, the word ‘Lourdes’ often evokes imagery of the Virgin Mary’s apparitions, but the historical, geographical and social context is usually excluded from the imagination. What exactly is the history of the place where a young Bernadette Soubirous experienced the Marian visions and how did the…
Lourdes: 160 years of healing Colm Fitzpatrick explores the short and remarkable life of St Bernadette A quirky and curious pub question that may raise a few eyebrows is: “Who is the first saint to be photographed?” The answer, believe it or not, is St Bernadette Soubirous, the renowned visionary of Lourdes, whose picture was…
Lourdes: 160 years of healing Greg Daly details how various Popes have been linked with Lourdes from the 1850s to today In an 1873 letter to Blessed Pope Pius IX, St Bernadette, then Sr Marie Bernard, recalled how Our Lady had appeared to her just four years after the declaration of the doctrine of…
Lourdes: 160 years of healing Greg Daly explores the roots of the title Our Lady used at Lourdes “I am the Immaculate Conception,” St Bernadette was told when, on March 25 1858, the simple peasant girl asked the lady who appeared to her who she was. Not knowing what this meant, the young girl hurried…
Lourdes: 160 years of healing Greg Daly looks at the first ever Irish national pilgrimage to Lourdes September 1913 may to most Irish people be a date forever linked with the Dublin lock-out and Yeats’s poem about Dublin Corporation’s failure to provide a home for the Hugh Lane paintings, but it was also the…
Lourdes: 160 years of healing Fr Robert McCabe reflects on his Lourdes pilgrimage experiences A visual harmony of architecture impresses pilgrim and tourist alike who make their way to the Grotto of Massabielle. The spires, mosaics and statues which surround the golden cross and crown provide a welcome relief and spiritual focus after the distraction…
Lourdes: 160 years of healing Greg Daly talks to Ireland’s man on Lourdes’s international medical bureau Belfast doctor Michael Moran, the first Irishman to serve on the International Medical Committee of Lourdes, has been a regular pilgrim to the shrine for over 20 years. “I think I was there as a child with Mum…
Lourdes: 160 years of healing Lourdes poses serious challenges for honest inquiring minds, writes Greg Daly There is something inexplicable about the miracles of Lourdes, according to the Nobel-prize-winning doctor who was one of three scientists credited with having discovered HIV. A non-believer, Prof. Luc Montagnier is currently based at Shanghai Jiao Tong University…
Lourdes: 160 years of healing Greg Daly writes of how Lourdes surprised two famous Catholic writers At Lourdes in May 1936, just a few weeks before his death, G.K. Chesterton commented of the crowds at the torchlight procession: “This is the only real League of Nations.” The English author had in fact been reluctant…
Colm Fitzpatrick
Greg Daly