Nearly 20 years ago, I stumbled upon the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes in France while traveling Europe with my daughter Amelia. Within a week of returning to Baltimore, I was never the same.
You could call it a miracle or a healing, as I was suffering from that most chronic of Crabtown afflictions, ARD.
Ain’t Right Disorder.
Or maybe it was just one of those things. But in the summer of 1990, I traveled to the Old World more or less as I had been most of my life, stopped at Lourdes in the southern foothills of the Pyrenees on a whim — it lies between Paris and Galicia in Spain, where my grandfather was born — and returned a better person in ways that persist to this day.
The Roman Catholic Church officially recognizes 67 inexplicable “healings” attributed to the intervention of Mary, the mother of Jesus, at Lourdes. About five million people visit the Shrine each year (Pope Benedict XVI celebrated Mass there last week) to pray and see the site where, the story goes, the Virgin Mary appeared in 1858 to a poor, 14-year-old named Bernadette Soubirous.
Bernadette was canonized in 1933. A decade later, a Hollywood movie of her story — “The Song of Bernadette” — earned Jennifer Jones an Oscar in the title role.
This is the 150th anniversary of the visions of Bernadette, in which she reported 18 separate apparitions of “a beautiful lady,” who told her to drink water from beneath a rock. There were just a few drops, but Bernadette scratched the dirt and eventually a spring began to bubble.
Today, it flows, and though the church does not hold that the water possesses miraculous properties, many of the faithful do, using it to drink and bathe.
In 1990, I bought a plastic vial embossed with an image of Mary at the bazaar above the grotto — with some 270 hotels, Lourdes is second only to Paris in accommodations.
I gave the water to my Polish grandmother, Anna Potter Jones of the St. Casimir parish in old Canton, and saved some for myself, storing it in a china cabinet that belonged to my Italian grandmother, Frances Prato Alvarez of Our Lady of Pompei.
It remains there today, a reminder of the good turns my life has taken with a nudge from above and a lot of hard work.
Rafael Alvarez can be reached at [email protected]
