Lourdes, in the foothills of the Pyrenees, is the largest healing shrine in the Catholic world, and a place whose entire working life is organised around receiving the seriously ill.
The apparitions of 1858
In 1858 a fourteen-year-old miller's daughter, Bernadette Soubirous, reported a series of apparitions of a lady at the grotto of Massabielle, who eventually identified herself with the words "I am the Immaculate Conception", a phrase matching a Marian doctrine defined by the Church four years earlier. Bernadette was directed to a spring that came to be associated with healing. After investigation the Church recognised the apparitions, and Bernadette was later canonised. Lourdes grew from a small town into a shrine receiving millions.
The apparatus of pilgrimage
What distinguishes Lourdes is the scale of its provision for the sick and disabled: hospitals, accessible accommodation, bathing pools fed by the spring, and a large seasonal population of volunteers, including the stretcher-bearers and helpers who accompany ill pilgrims. Pilgrims drink and wash in the spring water and file past the grotto to touch the rock. Torchlight processions and the daily Blessed Sacrament procession, at which the sick are blessed, structure the day. The Church maintains a Medical Bureau that assesses reported cures; a small number have been formally declared miraculous after rigorous review, but the great majority of pilgrims come for consolation and solidarity rather than in expectation of a cure.
Present life
Lourdes remains an active shrine of the Catholic Church, drawing several million people a year, a great many of them gravely ill, alongside ordinary pilgrims and the sick who come to serve them. Its significance lies less in the disputed question of miracles than in its role as a place where illness and disability are placed at the centre rather than the margin of religious life.