The Lord be with you.
A reading from the Holy Gospel according to Luke.
A reading from the Holy Gospel.
A reading from the Holy Gospel according to Luke.
A reading from the Holy Gospel according to Luke.
A reading from the Holy Gospel according to Luke.
Now in her sixth month, for nothing is impossible with God.
I am the handmaid of the Lord, said Mary, that what you have said be done to me.
And the angel left her.
The Gospel of the Lord.
The Gospel of the Lord.
The apparitions of Our Lady at Lourdes
belong to a series of modern Marian apparitions
that have been approved by the Church
in the wake of...
Our Lady's appearance at Rue du Bac,
where she gave St. Catherine Labouret
the Medal of the Immaculate Conception.
And then sandwiched between that
and the apparitions of Our Lady at Fatima,
where she came as the Immaculate Heart of Mary
and Our Lady of the Rosary.
We find these apparitions of Our Lady of Lourdes
to St. Bernadette in 1858,
a continuation of the same theme.
Our Lady comes to us as the Immaculate One,
to Bernadette, who throughout the apparitions
continued to ask Our Lady,
Who are you?
And Our Lady didn't answer,
time after time.
Finally, on one day,
when St. Bernadette asked the question,
she looked up to heaven with her hands together
in the pose that we usually see of Our Lady of Lourdes.
And then she looked down at Bernadette
and lowered her hands after the pose
of Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal.
And she said to St. Bernadette,
I am.
I am the Immaculate Conception.
St. Bernadette was a rather ignorant child,
had a hard time remembering things,
and so she wanted to take the message
directly to the parish priest.
And so she, in order to remember it,
she kept repeating over to herself
again and again on her way
over to the church and the rectory,
I am the Immaculate Conception.
I am the Immaculate Conception.
So that she wouldn't forget it,
because she had no idea what it meant.
And then she told the parish priest,
who was rather stunned,
this came four years after the proclamation
of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception
in 1854 by Blessed Pius IX.
And so it was a solemn dogma
proclaimed by the church
and of the highest certitude.
But Our Lady didn't say,
I am immaculately conceived,
or I am conceived without sin,
or I am the one without sin,
or something like that.
She said, I am the Immaculate Conception.
And that seemed strange to the parish priest,
and it seemed rather odd also to the theologians
who would investigate the authenticity
of these apparitions.
And in the end, of course,
they were proclaimed authentic.
But the words of Our Lady have remained mysterious
and the subject of many meditations,
not least of which was the meditation
of St. Maximilian Kolbe,
who the night before he was arrested
and sent to Auschwitz was given a very deep insight
into the mystery of Our Lady's Immaculate Conception.
And knowing that he was going to be arrested
with a sort of mystical grace,
he got his secretary and knelt down at his desk
and dictated a long passage on the Immaculate Conception.
But he reflected upon what Our Lady said,
at Lourdes, and noted that she didn't say
that I am immaculately conceived,
or I am the one without sin,
but she said, I am the Immaculate Conception,
something that reminds us of what God said to Moses
at the burning bush when he revealed himself to Moses.
I am who am, it was a kind of identity statement,
but one that in the words of Our Lady,
which seemed rather odd because she's not God,
she's immaculately conceived,
but how could she say I am the Immaculate Conception?
St. Maximilian reflected because she is so united
to the Holy Spirit that in a certain sense,
she uses the Holy Spirit's name.
The Holy Spirit is the fruit of the love
of the Father and of the Son.
And you might call him,
the Father's actually called him
the kiss of the Father and the Son,
or the love of the Father and the Son.
So St. Maximilian reflected
that Our Lady or that the Holy Spirit
is really the conception of that love
between the Father and the Son.
And so he is in a sense, an eternal Immaculate Conception.
And so outside of time and eternity,
the Holy Spirit is the fullness of the love
of the Father and the Son
and the eternal Immaculate Conception.
But in time, Our Lady is the one
who's been filled with God's grace.
As we read about in the gospel today,
the angel comes to Our Lady,
and he doesn't say to her,
hail you the one who is full of grace.
And he doesn't say hail Mary full of grace,
as we do in the prayer, in the angelic salutation.
He says, hail full of grace,
as though full of grace were her name.
So St. Maximilian says that Our Lady takes the name
of the Holy Spirit, and rightly so,
because God from the first instant of her existence
in the womb of St. Anne fills her
with the Holy Spirit, fills her with God's grace.
In fact, in St. Luke's gospel, what the angel says,
which is recorded by St. Luke in Greek,
kakarito mene, means, it basically means
the one who has already been filled with God's grace.
It refers to a previous time,
something that happened before the Annunciation.
For us, that's the Immaculate Conception.
But St. Maximilian reflected upon this
and realized that the Immaculate Conception
is not just an abstract thing
or the state of Our Lady's being,
but it really identifies her for who she is
and reminds us that she is the masterpiece
of God's creation, and he has sent her to us
to bring us her son, and he has sent her to us
to intercede and to intervene
on our behalf.
To make us holy.
She never promised that, Lord, that there would be cures.
She told St. Bernadette to wash in the stream,
and it turned out she ended up basically washing in mud
because at the time there was so little water coming out
that it just started.
But people just spontaneously went to the water
and began to bathe.
And miracle after miracle after miracle occurred.
And of course, more and more people came to Lourdes
and wanted to wash in the spring,
just recognizing the power of God.
But Our Lady never promised a miracle.
She just promised the spring,
and the people spontaneously went there.
And there is power in those waters.
People go there and bathe in those waters.
And if you go there today, you'll go into the bath,
and basically they change the water in the baths
a couple times a day.
But hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people
bathe in the same water.
Nobody has ever gotten sick.
But many, many, many, many people have been cured.
But Our Lady wanted those miracles
to be a sign of the power that God has entrusted to her,
and a sign of the power of God exercised through her
to make us holy, to cleanse us from our sins.
So those waters at Lourdes, you know, are a reflection.
They are a reminder of the waters of baptism.
And St. Maximilian said that in the waters of baptism,
we can see a reflection of Our Lady.
You know, she is pure.
She is holy.
She is the water of God.
She is the instrument that God has used
to bring holiness into this world.
She is not only the Immaculate Conception,
but because she is the Immaculate Conception,
she is the Mother of God.
And so we wish to appreciate, as St. Bernadette did,
the identity of Our Lady and unite ourselves with her,
to come to love her and find joy in her presence.
St. Bernadette, one time, while she was going through the apparition,
began to weep.
She looked as though she was going to die.
And so they wanted to get her away from the grotto.
So they basically picked her up and carried her away.
She was walking.
But they had her.
They had her in their arms.
And the whole way back, she had her eyes on Our Lady.
Apparently, Our Lady followed her back.
And people who saw her being brought through the streets
commented on how beautiful she was,
how radiant and ecstatic she was gazing upon Our Lady
and living in her presence.
And many were encouraged, of course, then,
to go to the grotto and have confidence
in the Blessed Mother.
And we should, as well, recognize the holiness,
the purity, the exalted goodness of Our Blessed Mother
and desire with our hearts to know her and to love her
and to commune with her.
And we could do that, of course, in many ways.
One of the ways, of course, that was emphasized at Lourdes
was the rosary.
Our Lady had the beads on her sash.
She didn't actually recite the Hail Mary.
She only recited the Our Fathers.
But she followed along the beads with Saint Bernadette
and the others as they prayed the rosary before the grotto.
So we wish to meditate upon the truths of our faith
through the eyes of Our Lady and ask
that we might have her faith, her pure faith, and her hope,
and most of all, her charity, her love for God,
her preeminent, preeminent holiness.
Let us then, as we continue to celebrate this holy sacrifice
of the Mass on this Feast of Our Lady of Lourdes,
let us ask Our Blessed Lady to come into our hearts
and purify them, to make them pure and clean
and a fitting dwelling place for the Son of God
who comes to us in Holy Communion.
May Our Lady of Lourdes and may Saint Bernadette be present
to us today, intercede on our behalf.
May Saint Maximilian teach us who Our Lady truly is.
She is not only the one who is immaculately conceived,
but she is the Immaculate Conception.
Her name is full of grace because she
is God's masterpiece of holiness and his mother, the one who
brings him to us and opens our hearts to his grace.
So shall we pray?