Lourdes Pilgrimage: The Grotto Guide

1. What Lourdes Is

Lourdes is a market town of the Hautes-Pyrenees in south-west France, built where the Gave de Pau runs out of the mountains. On the edge of the town, on a bend of that river, stands a hump of rock the local people called Massabielle, the old mass of rock. At its foot is a shallow cave with a small oval opening above and to the right. In 1858 the place was a rubbish ground where swine were pastured and driftwood collected. It is now the centre of the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes, and the reason pilgrims come in large numbers to a small town with no other claim on the world's attention.

Two things make Lourdes what it is, and they are worth separating at the start. The first is an event: a poor, asthmatic, uneducated girl said that a young woman appeared to her eighteen times over five months, spoke to her in her own dialect, and asked for prayer, penance, a chapel and processions. The second is a place built to answer that request: a walled riverside enclosure the sanctuary calls the Domain, with the grotto at its heart, three basilicas above and around it, reception houses for sick pilgrims, an esplanade wide enough for a nightly procession of many thousands, and a rhythm of Mass, rosary and adoration that runs from dawn until late at night.

The pilgrim who understands the second without the first sees a large and well-run religious complex. The pilgrim who understands the first without the second arrives expecting a spectacle and finds instead a rock, a stream of candles, and a long queue of people in wheelchairs. Lourdes rewards those who hold both together, and that is what this guide sets out to give you.

2. Bernadette Soubirous Before 1858

Marie-Bernarde Soubirous, called Bernadette, was born in Lourdes on 7 January 1844, the eldest child of Francois Soubirous, a miller, and Louise Casterot. For her first years the family lived at the Boly Mill, which her father worked. He was a poor businessman in a hard decade, the mill failed, and the family fell through the floor of the town's economy.

By 1857 the Soubirous family of six was living in a single ground-floor room on the rue des Petits Fosses, a disused prison cell that the town had given up as unfit to hold prisoners because it was damp. A relative let them have it rent-free. The room is still there and pilgrims visit it. Lourdes calls it the cachot, the lock-up. Ten minutes standing in it settles the question of who Bernadette was before anything happened to her: the daughter of a family that had run out of options.

Illiterate, Asthmatic, and Not Yet a Communicant

Bernadette had chronic asthma, probably worsened by the cholera epidemic that swept Lourdes in 1854. She spoke Bigourdan, the local variety of Occitan, and had very little French. She could not read or write. She had been sent out to the hamlet of Bartres to mind sheep and earn her keep, and she came back to Lourdes in January 1858, a few weeks before the first apparition, in order to attend catechism classes and prepare for her First Communion, which she had not yet made at fourteen because nobody had had the time or money to see to it.

This matters for the events that follow. The girl at the centre of Lourdes had no theological vocabulary, no schooling, and no standing in the town. When she was asked, later, whether she had persuaded anyone, she gave an answer that has been quoted ever since and that describes her role exactly: she was charged to tell people, and she was not charged to make them believe.

3. The Eighteen Apparitions

On Thursday 11 February 1858, Bernadette went with her sister Toinette and a friend, Jeanne Abadie, to gather firewood and bones along the Gave. The other two crossed the cold millstream. Bernadette, whose asthma made her cautious, stopped to take off her stockings, and while she was doing so she heard a noise like wind and looked up at the cave in the rock. In the niche above the opening she saw a young woman in white with a blue sash, a yellow rose on each foot, and a rosary over her arm. Bernadette reached for her own rosary and prayed it. She would not name the figure. In her own account she called her aquero, the Bigourdan word for "that", because she had no idea what she was looking at.

Eighteen apparitions followed between that day and 16 July 1858. The pattern was this: a second on 14 February; a third on 18 February, at which the figure spoke for the first time and asked Bernadette to come to the grotto every day for a fortnight; then daily visits through 4 March, with two days on which nothing happened; then a gap, and a single apparition on 25 March, the feast of the Annunciation; another on 7 April; and the last on 16 July.

What Was Said

The words Bernadette reported are few, plain, and were written down within days by people who interrogated her repeatedly and separately. Nothing in them is a prediction, a secret about the future, or a date. They are a series of requests.

• 18 February. Asked to come for fifteen days, the lady told Bernadette that she did not promise to make her happy in this world, and that she would be happy in the next.
• 24 February. Penance, three times over, and prayer to God for sinners. Bernadette kissed the ground and walked on her knees at the lady's direction, in front of a crowd that did not know what she was doing.
• 25 February. "Go, drink at the spring and wash yourself in it." There was no spring. Bernadette scratched at the dirt in a corner of the grotto until muddy water gathered in the hollow, drank it, smeared her face with it, and ate some bitter grass growing there. The watching crowd concluded she had lost her mind. The water cleared during the following days and has run ever since.
• 2 March. "Go and tell the priests that people are to come here in procession and that a chapel is to be built here." Bernadette carried the message to the parish priest, Dominique Peyramale, who was hostile and who told her to ask the lady for her name.
• 25 March. The name, in Occitan. Section 4 takes this on its own.

The Town, the Police and the Prefect

The civil authorities of the Second Empire treated the affair as a public order problem and a possible fraud. The police commissioner Dominique Jacomet and the imperial prosecutor Vital Dutour questioned Bernadette and tried to break her account. She did not change it, and she did not embroider it either, which is the detail that impressed the officials most and helped them least. Crowds grew through the spring. In June the prefect of the department had the grotto barricaded, the candles and offerings removed, and access forbidden. The barrier was taken down in October 1858 on the personal order of Napoleon III.

Bernadette gained nothing from any of this. Her family remained poor, she refused money, and she found the attention unbearable. She spent the rest of her short life trying to get out of the way of the story.

4. I Am the Immaculate Conception

On 25 March 1858, the feast of the Annunciation, Bernadette asked the question Fr Peyramale had told her to ask, four times over. The answer came in Bigourdan Occitan: Que soy era Immaculada Councepciou. "I am the Immaculate Conception." Bernadette repeated the sentence over and over on the way to the presbytery so that she would not lose it, and by her own account she did not know what it meant.

The phrase was not a title anyone in Lourdes was using in conversation. It was a doctrinal formula. On 8 December 1854, three years and three months before, Pope Pius IX had defined in the bull Ineffabilis Deus that the Blessed Virgin Mary, from the first instant of her conception, was preserved free from all stain of original sin by a singular grace of God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ. The Catechism of the Catholic Church treats the doctrine at paragraphs 490 to 493.

What struck Fr Peyramale, and later the diocesan commission, was the grammar. Catholic devotion normally says that Mary was immaculately conceived. The figure at the grotto used the phrase as a name for herself, the way one might say "I am mercy". A girl inventing a title would very likely have said "I am the Immaculate Virgin" or "I am the Mother of God". The reported sentence is theologically stranger and harder than anything a fourteen-year-old with no schooling was likely to construct, and the strangeness is a large part of why the priest changed his mind.

For the wider question of how the Church weighs a claimed miracle at all, and the ratio between what is claimed at Lourdes and what is medically and canonically recognised, see the dedicated guide to miracles and how the Church verifies them, which owns that ground in full. This page does not restate the cure statistics.

5. The Spring, and What the Church Claims for It

The spring at Lourdes is widely misunderstood, and the misunderstanding runs in a specific direction: people arrive believing the water is medicine. It is not, and the Church has never said it was.

The Documented Position

Within months of the water appearing, the question of its composition was put to a chemist. An analysis carried out in 1858 and 1859 by Filhol, professor of chemistry at Toulouse, reported that the water of the grotto was ordinary potable water carrying nothing that would give it any medicinal or curative property. That finding has never been contested by the sanctuary, and it is a useful thing to know before you fill a bottle. The water of Lourdes is drinking water off a Pyrenean hillside.

The 1858 to 1859 analysis is that of Professor Filhol of Toulouse, commissioned during the diocesan enquiry and cited in the acts of the enquiry that led to the 1862 episcopal judgment. The Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes publishes the same position on its own account: the water is not medicinal and the sanctuary makes no claim of curative property for it.

Why a Catholic Uses It Anyway

Water that does nothing chemically can still do a great deal sacramentally, and Catholic practice has always known the difference. Water blessed for religious use belongs to the category the Church calls sacramentals: sacred signs instituted by the Church which prepare people to receive the fruit of the sacraments and which sanctify various circumstances of life. The Catechism sets this out at paragraphs 1667 to 1670, and the crucial line is that sacramentals do not confer the grace of the Holy Spirit in the manner of the sacraments. They dispose the person to receive grace and to cooperate with it. The efficacy lies with God and with the prayer of the Church, and it is not resident in the object.

So the gesture at Lourdes is a prayer performed with the body. It has three biblical shapes behind it, and they are worth carrying with you to the tap.

Naaman the Syrian is furious at the ordinariness of the command. He wanted a prophet's ceremony and got an instruction to wash in a muddy provincial river. The point of the story is obedience in a small humiliating act, and it maps onto Bernadette scraping mud in front of a jeering crowd with unusual precision.

And at the pool of Bethesda in John 5:2 to 9, Jesus finds a man who has spent thirty-eight years beside water he believes will cure him, asks him whether he wants to be well, and heals him without the water being involved at all. That passage is read at Lourdes more often than any other, and it is the correction the place administers to its own reputation. Christ heals. The pool is where the sick were gathered.

6. The Baths and the Water Gesture

The baths, the piscines, grew out of the 25 February instruction to wash. For well over a century the practice took a settled form: pilgrims queued in the covered bath houses beside the grotto, were helped by volunteers behind a curtain into a stone or marble trough of water piped from the spring, were lowered briefly into it or had it poured over them, and prayed a short prayer while it happened. The water was cold, and it was not changed between pilgrims, which is the detail that startles people when they first hear it.

The form of the gesture has changed more than once in the sanctuary's history, and it changed again in recent years. Alongside the immersion, the sanctuary has offered a simpler geste de l'eau, a water gesture, in which a helper pours water over the pilgrim's hands, the pilgrim drinks a little, washes their own face, and passes through. What is on offer in any given season is decided by the sanctuary, and the honest instruction for a pilgrim is to ask when you arrive rather than to trust a description written elsewhere, including this one.

What the Gesture Is For

Underneath the practical variation the meaning has stayed constant, and it is not a treatment. The washing is penitential. It belongs beside confession, and the sanctuary places the two together on purpose: the grotto has a large penitence chapel and confessors hearing in many languages a few minutes' walk away. Washing in cold water in front of strangers is a small, deliberate humiliation, chosen freely, in the pattern of baptism, which is the washing that actually changes a person. Pilgrims who go to the water and then to the sacrament of confession in the same afternoon have understood the sequence the place is built to teach.

Three things follow from that, and they save a great deal of disappointment.

• Nothing is guaranteed by the gesture. No cure, no consolation, no feeling. Many people find the baths anticlimactic and cold and nothing else, and that is a normal Lourdes experience rather than a failed one.
• The queue is part of it. You will wait a long time, in weather, among people much sicker than you. That is not an inefficiency in the system.
• You can skip it. The taps below the grotto are open to everyone and require no queue and no assistance. A pilgrim who never enters the baths has not done Lourdes wrong.

7. The Grotto Today: What You Actually See

The grotto of Massabielle is smaller than photographs suggest. It is a shallow overhang in grey rock, perhaps the size of a modest room, open along its front to a paved area and the river beyond. There is no door and no barrier across the entrance.

Inside, at the back, there is a simple stone altar where Mass is celebrated. Above and to the right of the opening is the niche where Bernadette said the figure stood. In it stands a white Carrara marble statue by the Lyon sculptor Joseph-Hugues Fabisch, placed there in 1864, with the Occitan sentence Que soy era Immaculada Councepciou carved at its foot. Bernadette saw the statue and said it did not resemble what she had seen. She never withdrew the criticism, and the sanctuary has never hidden it. The statue is a nineteenth-century French artist's conception of a heavenly lady, tall and serene. Bernadette described someone small, young, and about her own age.

Along the left-hand wall of the grotto, as you walk through, the rock has been worn to a polish by the hands of pilgrims. People move along it slowly with one palm on the stone, which is the ordinary way of passing through, and there is no instruction to do it. Above, in a cleft, grows a wild rose bush. Below the statue, behind glass, you can see the spring itself. The water is piped out to a row of taps and to fountains a short distance downstream, where people fill bottles, and to the baths.

Candles burn continuously in banks of iron holders downstream from the grotto, where pilgrims leave tapers ranging from finger-sized to enormous. The sanctuary keeps them burning day and night. The smell of hot wax reaches the grotto on a still evening.

How to Behave There

Silence is kept in and around the grotto, and it is enforced gently by everyone present. Do not talk. Phones are put away. There is seating in rows facing the rock, and a great many people simply sit there for an hour or two. If you have come a long way and can only do one thing at Lourdes, sit in front of the grotto and pray the rosary slowly. That is the whole of what Bernadette did there, and the sanctuary exists to make it possible for you to do the same. For the structure of the prayer itself, see the guide to praying the rosary.

8. The Crypt and the Three Basilicas

The lady asked for a chapel. What was built instead, over ninety years, was four churches stacked on and around the rock, each one an answer to crowds the previous one could not hold.

Dates of construction and consecration above follow the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes, which publishes the building history of each church in the Domain. The title of minor basilica is a papal grant recorded in the sanctuary's own account of the upper basilica.

A fifth church stands across the river. The Church of St Bernadette was consecrated in 1988 on the far bank, at the spot where Bernadette stood on 16 July 1858 for the last apparition, when the grotto itself was fenced off and she could only look at it from the opposite side of the Gave. Its position is the point of it.

The two ramps of the Rosary Basilica sweep up from the esplanade to the upper basilica and enclose the great square in front. The bronze crowned Virgin stands on the esplanade below. The visual arrangement is deliberate: everything on that axis leads the eye down and to the left, past the churches, to the rock.

9. The Domain and Its Rhythm

The Domain is the walled sanctuary precinct between the town and the river, entered by several gates, of which the busiest is Saint Michael's Gate at the head of the esplanade. Inside it there is no commerce. The shops selling rosaries and plastic bottles, which visitors sometimes take to be the character of Lourdes, are all in the town outside the wall. Pass through the gate and the tone changes within twenty metres.

A pilgrimage at Lourdes runs to a shape rather than a schedule, and the shape is roughly this.

• Morning. Mass, in a language group, at the grotto altar, in the crypt, in one of the basilicas or in a chapel. The International Mass gathers many nationalities into one liturgy, with readings and intercessions in a rotation of languages.
• Through the day. The Stations of the Cross. Large cast-iron figures line a steep path up the wooded Espelugues hillside above the Domain, a demanding climb. A level route near the Rosary Basilica carries the same stations for pilgrims who cannot manage the hill, and it is used constantly.
• The taps and the water gesture, in whatever form the sanctuary is offering.
• Confession, at the reconciliation chapel, with confessors hearing in many languages.
• Afternoon. The Blessed Sacrament procession.
• Night. The torchlight Marian procession.
• Any hour. Sitting at the grotto. Adoration in the chapel of adoration. Walking the Jubilee route through the town to the places of Bernadette's own life.

The Places of Bernadette in the Town

Outside the Domain, in the streets of Lourdes, four buildings connected with Bernadette stand within a short walk of one another. The Boly Mill, where she was born. The cachot on the rue des Petits Fosses, the disused prison cell where the family was living in February 1858. The parish church, which holds the font from the older parish church in which she was baptised. And the chapel of the hospice of the Sisters of Charity of Nevers, where she made her First Communion on 3 June 1858, in the middle of the year of the apparitions. Doing this walk before going to the grotto changes what you see at the grotto.

10. The Two Processions

Two processions have shaped the Lourdes day for well over a century, and between them they carry the theology of the place. One is Marian, at night, with candles. One is Eucharistic, in the afternoon. The order matters: Mary leads the crowd, and Christ is carried to the sick.

The Torchlight Marian Procession

After dark, pilgrims gather at the grotto end of the Domain with candles in paper shades and move up the esplanade to the Rosary Basilica in a slow column that can take a long time to pass. The rosary is prayed aloud, decade by decade, each decade led in a different language, so that a Filipino group, an Irish diocese, a Polish parish and a Tamil congregation take the Hail Marys in turn and everyone answers in their own tongue. Between the decades everyone sings the same thing.

The Lourdes hymn carries the singing. Its verses tell the story of the apparitions in sequence, and its refrain is two words repeated: Ave, Ave, Ave Maria. The verse text is attributed to the French priest Jean Gaignet, written in the 1870s for pilgrims who could not read. The tune is simple enough to be picked up in one pass, which is why it was written that way. Candles rise on the refrain, and a pilgrim who expected to find the whole thing sentimental will often be surprised by it.

The Blessed Sacrament Procession

In the afternoon a priest carries the Blessed Sacrament in a monstrance from the grotto meadow, up the esplanade and into the underground basilica or across the square, under a canopy, with servers and lights, while the crowd walks behind and hymns are sung in Latin. The sick are placed along the route in their wheelchairs and blue pull-carts, at the front, so that the Sacrament passes directly in front of them. The procession ends with Benediction, and the blessing is given over the sick first.

This is the centre of Lourdes, and first-time pilgrims often arrive expecting the baths to be the centre instead. The washing and the water gesture point at baptism. The afternoon procession points at the Eucharist, which is where Catholic teaching locates the real presence of Christ. For what the Church holds about the Sacrament being carried past those chairs, see the guide to the Eucharist and the real presence.

11. The Malades and Their Helpers

Lourdes is organised around sick pilgrims to a degree that is difficult to convey to someone who has not stood in it. The sick are called les malades, and the Domain has the shape it has because of them.

Sick pilgrims are housed in dedicated reception buildings inside or beside the Domain, the accueils, staffed to nursing standards, of which the Accueil Notre-Dame and the Accueil Marie Saint-Frai are the principal ones. They are moved about the sanctuary in blue canvas pull-carts, the voitures bleues, drawn and pushed by volunteers. They go first in every procession, first to the baths, first to the front at Mass, and first under the monstrance at Benediction. Everyone else waits.

The Hospitalite

The volunteers who do this work belong to the Hospitalite Notre-Dame de Lourdes and to the many national and diocesan hospitalities that come with their own pilgrimages. They grew out of the volunteer stretcher-bearers of the nineteenth century, who met the trains. They are unpaid, they pay their own way to Lourdes, they serve in shifts through the week, and they wear the harness and braces you will see all over the Domain. The work is manual: lifting, pushing, feeding, washing, waiting in the rain with someone else's dying mother.

A great many people who go to Lourdes go as helpers rather than as pilgrims in need, and this is worth naming as a real option. Diocesan pilgrimages from most countries recruit them, including young volunteers. It is one of the few forms of Catholic service where the work and its meaning are visible in the same afternoon.

12. How the Church Judged Lourdes

Lourdes was judged under a procedure the Church has since replaced, and getting this right matters, because the language people use about apparitions is usually a generation or two out of date.

The 1862 Judgment

Bertrand-Severe Laurence, Bishop of Tarbes, waited. He set up a diocesan commission in the summer of 1858, which took evidence for over three years, examined Bernadette repeatedly, heard the medical and chemical reports, and reported to him. On 18 January 1862 he issued a pastoral judgment stating that the Immaculate Mother of God had truly appeared to Bernadette Soubirous at the grotto of Massabielle, permitting the devotion, and authorising the building of a church on the site. That decree is the act behind Lourdes, and it can be named precisely, which is not true of every Marian shrine. Later acts followed from it: Pope Pius X extended the feast of Our Lady of Lourdes to the whole Latin Church in 1907, Pius XII wrote the encyclical Le Pelerinage de Lourdes for the centenary in 1957, and John Paul II and Benedict XVI both went there as pope.

The judgment of 18 January 1862 is the pastoral letter of Bishop Bertrand-Severe Laurence of Tarbes, published in the diocesan acts of Tarbes and reproduced by the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes. The 1907 extension of the feast is an act of Pope Pius X. Le Pelerinage de Lourdes was published by Pope Pius XII in 1957 and is available from the Holy See.

What Changed in 2024

On 17 May 2024 the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith published new Norms for Proceeding in the Discernment of Alleged Supernatural Phenomena. Under these norms the Church ordinarily does not declare that an apparition is supernatural at all. The competent authority, working with the Dicastery, reaches one of six conclusions.

The six conclusions above are those of the Norms for Proceeding in the Discernment of Alleged Supernatural Phenomena, published by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith on 17 May 2024.

The practical effect is that "approved" is no longer the right word for a recent case. On 19 September 2024 the same Dicastery issued a note titled The Queen of Peace granting a nihil obstat to the spiritual experience connected with Medjugorje in Bosnia and Herzegovina. That permits public devotion. It makes no declaration that the apparitions there are supernatural. Saying Medjugorje was approved is wrong, and saying it was rejected or that it remains under study is also wrong. The accurate statement is the one the Dicastery made.

13. Bernadette at Nevers

Bernadette did not stay at Lourdes, and the second half of her life is the part that convinces sceptics more often than the first.

She lived at the hospice of the Sisters of Charity of Nevers in Lourdes for several years, learning to read and write and being shown to an endless procession of visitors, which she loathed. In July 1866, aged twenty-two, she entered the novitiate of the same congregation at the convent of Saint-Gildard at Nevers in central France, a long way north of the Pyrenees, and took the name Sister Marie-Bernard. She never returned to Lourdes. She never saw the basilica finished. She refused to be treated as a celebrity, was deliberately given humble work and sharp correction by her superiors, served as an infirmarian and a sacristan, and answered the same questions about 1858 for the rest of her life with the same short answers.

She was ill for most of her time there: asthma, and tuberculosis of the bone in her right knee, which was agonising and which nobody suggested she take to Lourdes water to cure. She died at Saint-Gildard on 16 April 1879, aged thirty-five. The sisters present recorded her last words as an appeal to Holy Mary, Mother of God, to pray for her, a poor sinner.

The Reliquary

Her body was exhumed three times as part of the canonisation process, in 1909, in 1919 and in 1925, and on each occasion it was found to have decayed very little. Light wax coverings were made for the face and the hands, and the body was placed in a glass reliquary in the chapel at Saint-Gildard, where it can be seen today. Nevers is a long way from Lourdes and is a much quieter place to pray, which is part of its appeal to people who find the Domain overwhelming.

Bernadette was beatified in 1925 and canonised by Pope Pius XI on 8 December 1933, the feast of the Immaculate Conception. Her feast is kept on 16 April, and on 18 February in France. The Church does not canonise people for visions. She was canonised for the obedience, the plainness and the endurance of the twenty-one years afterwards, which is the part of her life that no crowd watched. For the wider question of what the Church means by declaring someone a saint, see the guide to the saints and why Catholics honour them, and for the woman at the centre of the whole account, the guide to Mary, the Mother of God.

14. Frequently Asked Questions