New categories of healing at Lourdes since 2006 and things you may not know (1)

Devotion to Our Lady of Lourdes has gripped the Catholic imagination since the mid-18th century. Lourdes is one of the very few apparitions the Vatican has officially commended as worthy of belief, with its own feast day, February 11, in the Church’s annual liturgical calendar. Some six million pilgrims come to the shrine in Lourdes, France, each year to pray and seek healing.

This popular pilgrimage is one of the most visible examples of the devotion of many Catholics to Mary. In 1858, a 14-year-old girl named Bernadette Soubirous reported having 18 visions of a beautiful “young lady” in a cave near Lourdes, which was then a provincial town. Soubirous said that the figure identified herself as “the Immaculate Conception” and instructed the girl to dig into the earth and drink the water she found there. In other messages, the lady asked for a church to be built there so priests could come in procession.

Many Catholics interpreted the apparitions as confirming the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, which Pope Pius IX in 1854 had declared to be an essential element of Catholic faith. This teaching holds that Mary, as the mother of Jesus, was conceived without original sin.

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Since the 1860s, Church officials have formally declared 70 of the Lourdes healings to be miracles. The most recent case, which they confirmed in 2018, involved the healing of a French nun who had been using a wheelchair and suffering severe pain for almost 30 years, but recovered soon after her pilgrimage to the grotto.

Over the course of the 20th century, the number of new miracles confirmed in Lourdes has gradually slowed because of growth in scientific understanding.

In 2006, Church officials declared that, beyond “miracles,” they would recognise three additional categories of healing at Lourdes, in light of advances in medical knowledge: “unexpected,” “confirmed” or “exceptional” healings. The new categories relax the previous strict division between “natural” and “supernatural” healings, with the implication that God intervenes in many cases in which health is restored, even those that do not strictly qualify as “miracles” in the sense traditionally used by the Catholic Church.

[...] Devotional practices involve the sensory experiences of seeing, touching, tasting and hearing. Visitors travel from all over the world to light candles in the grotto, touch the rock where Soubirous said the Virgin appeared, join in the chants of the twice-daily processions, attend Mass, take Communion, and bathe in and drink the holy waters of the spring.

P. Dorian Llywelyn, SJ - The Conversation, americamagazine.org

Adapted from www.heraldmalaysia.com