Lent is the key to the message of Lourdes

A study of the distribution of the apparitions at Lourdes shows that they are carefully ordered around the 40 days of Lent.

No less than 14 of the 18 apparitions took place during this liturgical season, which in fact constitutes the main axis of the whole. This centrality is reinforced by the positioning of the four remaining apparitions, which "bookend" this period, with two occurring before and two after.

Another sign of the decisive importance of this period is the fact that Mary spoke to Bernadette for the first time during the apparition that followed Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. She asked her: "Would you be so kind as to come here for two weeks?"

Then there was a series of 13 apparitions, interrupted by two 1-day breaks, dividing these apparitions into three series.

Then a 3-week break, before the 14th and last apparition during Lent, the one in which the Virgin Mary gave her name and pronounced the key phrase of her visits to Lourdes: "I am the Immaculate Conception". These words were spoken on the same day as the feast of the Annunciation.

It is during this set of 13 apparitions, the first ones in Lent, that Mary asked to pray for sinners, called for their conversion and insisted on penance. This penance concerns both the body and the spirit.

In the 7th apparition, which occurred at the very center of this series, Bernadette humbled herself by obeying the Mother of God's instructions. She performed seemingly absurd and off-putting gestures, such as kissing the ground, crawling on her knees, smearing mud on her face, washing herself at the spring, eating the grass growing in the cave (northern golden saxifrage), while trying to drink the muddy water that surfaced from the ground and, after Bernadette had dug the earth, became the famous miraculous spring.

The people present were dismayed; many of them thought that the young shepherdess was crazy. Her self-humiliation was all the more striking that the Soubirous family had fallen low on the social scale.

Some animals eat grass to purge their stomach. This gesture as well as the presence of water evoke the traditional rituals of purification. They take on their full meaning in this period of Lent, a time of fasting and sanctification before Easter, the austerity of which fosters awareness of sin.

Patrick Sandrin

Excerpt of À ciel ouvert, EDB, Nouan 2013, p. 115-116