Lourdes at 150

Today is the feast of Our Lady of Lourdes. In 1858 the Blessed Virgin mary visited St. Bernadette Soubirous 18 times. Mary requested that a chapel be built on the spot. This is the 150 year Jubilee of this visitation.

The Shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes in southern France is the most visited pilgrimage site in the world--mainly because of the apparent healing properties of the waters of the spring that appeared during the apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Official Shrine Site

150 Year Jubilee


The Lourdes Marian Center here in Denver is an official distributor of water from Lourdes. When anyone is sick around our house, Sophia gets out her bottle of Lourdes water and prays for us.

Icon Available from Monastery Icons

"The story told by the ignorant little girl, and the wonders wrought by the slender stream which flowed forth from the rock beneath her hands, have gone further to confound the objections of the sceptical criticism which calls itself modern thought, than the arguments of the most learned apologists or of the most subtle theologians. God has taken the weak and the foolish things of the world into His hands, and with these for ffis instruments has overcome those who, in the pride of their intellect, had set themselves up against Him—has silenced the learned and bewildered the scientific—and in the midst of the most mocking incredulous country of this mocking incredulous age, has shown us the Grotto of Lourdes as an irrefragable testimony to His existence, His power, and His love."

The English Pilgrimage to Lourdes, May 1883