I promise to make you happy...

What did the Virgin Mary say to Bernadette, after the noticeable silence of the first two apparitions—a silence that acted like an entryway or a preparation centered on the beautiful sign of the cross that Mary would soon carefully teach her? Let us say, in passing, that this sign of the cross was the first silent preaching of the heavenly visitation, and how expressive it was! Someone once said to an unbelieving priest: "If you had seen her sign of the cross, you would change your mind!"

What did Mary say? She said something essential, the true form of which must be sought in the first book published in 1869, written by Henri Lasserre, who had direct contact with Bernadette and who cannot have invented it: "I promise to make you happy, not in this world but in the other one." (Let's admit that "I promise" sounds different from the "I don't promise" we usually read!). Why was this sentence later strangely "simplified" into "I don't promise to make you happy in this world but in the other"? We don't know.

This "other world" is obviously not only Heaven's happiness. Why is it so? Because it would be the death of the Christian message! The reign of God is justice, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit, says Saint Paul (Rom 16:17). We must live it today, all the more so since Jesus affirms: "Whoever hears my word and believes in Him who sent me has eternal life" (Jn 5:24).

This life with God is accompanied by a mysterious joy and a particular wisdom that we see in the saints and martyrs, and that is like God’s own signature. Suffering in bed, Bernadette said something that Father Petitot (a Dominican priest and author of a remarkable book written just after Bernadette’s canonization in 1933) considered essential. Bernadette pronounced it while she was suffering so much, sick in bed, holding the large crucifix that was given to her at the end of her life: "I am happier than a queen on her throne."

Father André Doze, Conference on the Message of Lourdes, 2007, at Lourdes Shrine.