A Novena to Our Lady of Lourdes

Bernadette Soubirous was fourteen years old, the daughter of a miller in Lourdes, when she reported the first of eighteen apparitions at the grotto of Massabielle on 11 February 1858; the last came on 16 July of the same year.

At the sixteenth apparition, on 25 March 1858, the figure identified herself, in the local Occitan dialect, as the Immaculate Conception, a title the Church had defined as dogma only four years earlier, in 1854, and one Bernadette said she did not understand.

On 25 February 1858, Bernadette was told to dig in the ground of the grotto and drink from what she found there; a spring began to flow that still runs today and supplies the shrine's baths.

Church authorities opened a formal investigation into the apparitions within weeks, and in 1862 the bishop of Tarbes declared them worthy of belief, permitting public devotion at the grotto.

The shrine's Bureau des Constatations Medicales, a medical office staffed by visiting doctors of any faith or none, has examined reported cures at Lourdes since 1883. It has reviewed several thousand claims, judged around twelve hundred of them medically inexplicable, and of those the Church has recognised about seventy as miraculous.

Lourdes receives an estimated three to five million pilgrims a year, and the overwhelming majority of the sick who visit report no physical cure, a fact the shrine's own literature states without qualification.

Bernadette entered the Sisters of Charity of Nevers in 1866 and died there of tuberculosis in 1879, aged thirty-five; her body was exhumed three times between 1909 and 1925 and found not to have decomposed, and it remains on public display in a glass reliquary at Nevers.

Pope Pius XI canonized Bernadette on 8 December 1933, the feast of the Immaculate Conception, in a ceremony at St. Peter's Basilica.

Pope John Paul II established 11 February, the anniversary of the first apparition, as the World Day of the Sick in 1992, observed for the first time the following year.