Benedict XVI had forged a deep bond with Our Lady of Lourdes

At age 95, Pope Benedict XVI continued to visit the Vatican's Lourdes grotto to pray the Rosary. He had forged a deep bond with Our Lady of Lourdes, whom he had visited in 2008 during a trip to France.

In October 2022, a young priest working for the Curia walked through the Vatican gardens to his offices not far from St. Peter's Square. Taking advantage of the opportunity, he decided to make a small detour to the grotto of Lourdes, a life-size reproduction in the Vatican of the rocky cavity where the Virgin appeared to the young Bernadette, in 1858.

The priest meditated in front of the grotto, laid the burden of his day before Our Lady, and then finished his prayer. But as he turned around to go back down the Vatican hill, he discovered, bewildered, the Pope emeritus also arriving towards the grotto, pushed in his wheelchair by the consecrated laywomen who have been taking care of him since his resignation in 2013. "I was stunned, overwhelmed with emotion. I did not move, I simply waved my hand," he confided, still inhabited by this vision.

To the very end, the Pope emeritus went to the grotto, located a few hundred meters above the Mater Ecclesiae monastery, where he lived. In his book Il Monastero, Vatican expert Massimo Franco recounts these discreet visits of a Pope who had resolved to live a life withdrawn from the world. "You could see him from afar, sitting on a bench, a white spot contrasting with the green of the bushes and trees: a thin silhouette, protected even in summer by a sleeveless windbreaker as white as his cassock."

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