Charity registration No. SC002876
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Notices
Sunday February 5th. 2012
This Sunday is the nearest to the feast of Our Lady of Lourdes,
and is dedicated as World Day of Prayer for the Sick. Lourdes
has a special affection in our devotions as Catholics whether we
have been able or not to make a pilgrimage to Our Lady's shrine.
You can be sure that most homes have a bottle of Lourdes water
On February 11, 1858, Our Lady appeared to Bernadette in the
grotto at Massabielle while her sisters had gone on ahead to
gather firewood. There were 18 appearances in all, the final one
being on July 16th. of the same year. Ridicule turned to belief as
thousands thronged the grotto- yet no one but Bernadette had
seen the Lady. At the request of her parish priest, she asked the
Lady her name, and the reply was:
I am the Immaculate Conception.
There was no way Bernadette could have known what this meant.
After many exhaustive investigations and the living proof of so
many miracles, the Church accepted that Our Lady had appeared
to Bernadette.
Sometime later, Bernadette entered
a convent in Nevers, south of Paris,
where in the few years that were to
remain to her, she lived a life of
holiness and virtue in the greatest of
simplicity.
She suffered intensely in her latter
days from her girlhood affliction of
asthma, and now from tuberculosis
of the lung and a tumour on her
knee, which caused her
excruciating pain but which she
managed to conceal from the sisters
in the. community. She died
peacefully and gently on April 16th,
1879.
Her body remained on view for
several days before being placed in
a coffin which was sealed in the presence of Civil and Church
witnesses. On May 30th., it was transferred from her grave to a
vault that had been specially prepared for her coffin in the
convent groundsn 1909, the Episcopal Commission examining
Bernadette's reputation for saintliness, virtue and miracles, with a
view to canonisation, completed its work. The body was exhumed
on September 22, 1909, as the first step of identification in
accordance with both civil and church law and for verification of
the state of the corpse. Present was the Bishop, the Chief of
Police, the Mayor, surgeons and pathologists of the highest
reputation. When the coffin was opened, there was no smell of
putrefaction, and the body was found to be an incredible state of
preservation. The nuns washed the body and replaced it in a new
coffin, after which it was sealed and reburied Her illness and the
state of her body when she died, the humidity in the vault, the rust
on her rosary beads and crucifix would all seem conducive to
disintegration of the flesh. >>>>>>>>
Our Lady of Lourdes
