Lourdes

Lourdes Commune in Occitania, (south-western) France.

Quotes about Lourdes:

 * Sometimes, bringing a silent film to Lourdes, he starts talking. (Romano Bertola)
 * Through the apparitions of Lourdes, Our Lady wanted to restore in us the love of the poor and poverty, an ingenious and liberating love. (René Laurentin)
 * We delude ourselves that we will obtain a miracle in Lourdes, even though in one hundred and fifty years Our Lady has officially granted only sixty-five, to one hundred million pilgrims. An average, less than one in a million, far lower than the percentage of spontaneous remissions of tumors, which is of the order of one in ten thousand. Not to mention that, as Émile Zola observed, among the votive offerings you can see many crutches but no wooden legs. (Piergiorgio Odifreddi)
 * I must say that there, in front of the cave, you can feel something that I don't know how to define, something great, mysterious, indescribable. (Gianni Morandi)
 * Until three o'clock I prefer Lourdes water! It's more pious. (Thérèse of Lisieux)
 * Lourdes – if believers are right – is a glimpse suddenly opened onto an Other World; it is the truth entrusted not to professors and experts, but to the illiterate; it is Heaven itself that ratifies the dogmas of a Pope, moreover "obscurantist" and "reactionary" like Pius IX: it is the mocked Catholic Mariology that has full confirmation; it is the blind who regains his sight, the cancerous person who heals, the paralytic who walks. Lourdes is – and cannot help but be – the scandal, the division, the denial of the common sense imposed by the new conformism. It has therefore not ceased its provocative role; nor, for that matter, will it ever be able to cease it. (Vittorio Messori)
 * I don't think our therapeutic successes can compete with those of Lourdes; the people who believe in the miracles of the Holy Virgin are much more numerous than those who believe in the existence of the unconscious. (Sigmund Freud)
 * For Mariam ad Iesum. This is the meaning of the Lourdes apparitions. (Pope John XXIII)
 * That cave is the place where what Catholic Mariology is is most evident: a bubo of authentic Christology. (Karl Barth)
 * All those who were physically healed in Lourdes have died or will die, even if for evils other than those for which they turned to Mary's intercession. [...] It is an obvious reflection, perhaps apparently banal. Yet, it allows us to clarify the Catholic's perspective in the face of the impressive dossier of "physical" healings which, at the foot of the Pyrenees, have not ceased to occur since 1858. The believer, that is, knows that what is promised by the Gospel - what 'everyone' is promised - it is indeed the radical and definitive "healing" of the body too; but only when this is resurrected to eternal life. (Vittorio Messori)
 * Yes, it has been a long and painful journey. I went to Lourdes in January and felt great straight after for a long time. It's an incredible place. (Cristiano De André)

Jacques Perrier:

 * In Lourdes Mary never puts herself in the foreground.
 * In Lourdes, in the climate of faith - full of peace and joy - which is typical of it and without pseudo-mystical exaltation, the disease ceases to scare both those who are well and those who are sick.
 * Lourdes is much more a city of volunteers than of merchants.

Related entries:

 * Bernadetta Soubirous
 * Mary
 * Miracle
 * Fatima
 * Immaculate Conception