by Brett Manero
I’m a few days late, but this past week saw the Feast of Our Lady of Lourdes, commemorating when the Mother of God appeared to a teenage French girl named Bernadette in Lourdes, France, in 1858. Like nearly all appearances of the Blessed Mother, Mary appeared to Bernadette in absolute humility and patience as the young girl discerned who this mysterious woman was. Over time, Bernadette discovered the miraculous spring which Mary told her about. Today, the location of the apparitions and the spring is visited by millions of pilgrims every year. Thousands of known miracles of healing have taken place in Lourdes, with many almost certainly yet to come.
I visited Lourdes for the first time in August of 2025. Earlier that summer, I had visited the American Marian site, in Champion, Wisconsin. It was a summer of Marian Pilgrimages, to be sure. I was blessed to be there on the Solemnity of the Assumption, and to drink water from the spring.
Why does the Catholic Church celebrate (approved) Marian apparitions? Perhaps because they are a reminder of the reality of God, the reality of Mary and the saints, and the reality of the ancient faith. Catholicism is real, just as God is real. It is historical, reasonable, and provable. Perhaps Mary appears in various locations throughout history as a simple reminder of this: that God is still working in the world, even if we are separated from the Christ Event by two-thousand years.
Famously, Mary identified herself as the Immaculate Conception to Bernadette. Only four years earlier, Pope Pius IX formally proclaimed the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, the awesome truth that Mary was conceived completely free from original sin. Perhaps Mary called herself this title as a wink to the Church that she, indeed, is the Immaculate Conception, and that papal infallibility is indeed a great gift to the Church, for it was through papal infallibility that Pius had proclaimed this dogma.
God is real. The Church is real, historical. The saints – past, present, and future – remind us of the historicity of Christianity. Mary, especially, shows us the awesome reality of it all. Her appearances not only show the Immaculate Conception to be true, but also the Assumption – proclaimed by Pope Pius XII in 1950. The Assumption proclaims that Mary was assumed, body and soul, into heaven at the end of her earthly life. The fact that she appears – not only her soul, but also her body – in places like Lourdes and Champion prove this dogma as well, for it is not a ghost that appears in these apparitions, but a truly living person with a body and a soul.
What a gift Mary is to the Church and to the world, and what a gift Lourdes and other Marian apparitions are.
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