Immaculate Conception made visible at Lourdes

We read at: https://militia-immaculatae.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Lourdes_Booklet_EN.pdf …. In 1914, as a clerical student Saint Maximilian was miraculously cured by means of water from Lourdes. To have lost his right thumb could have prevented him from receiving priestly orders. His miraculous cure was a visible sign of Mary’s care of his priestly vocation. During his life Saint Maximilian Kolbe visited Lourdes only once. It was on the 30th of January 1930, before undertaking his mission to the Far East. In Lourdes Saint Maximilian celebrated the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass in the Basilica, he prayed the rosary in the Grotto, he drank the miraculous water and he sank his finger in the water, he kissed the rock in the Grotto and he commended his prayers to Mary. Summarising his visit to Lourdes, he stressed the experience of a great love of His "Mamusia (Mammy)", as he fondly called the Immaculata. The apparitions in Lourdes had a special place in the Marian treaty begun by Father Maximilian (which he never completed). The Saint gave a description of the apparitions. However, most of all, St. Maximilian discussed the meaning of the name 'Immaculate Conception': "The Immaculate Conception — this privilege must be particularly dear to her if, at Lourdes, this is how she herself wanted to be called: I am the Immaculate Conception. These words must indicate accurately and in the most essential manner who she is." "'Immaculate Conception' — these words came out of the mouth of the Immaculata herself. Therefore, they must indicate accurately and in the most essential manner who she is. Who are you, O Immaculate Conception? Not God, for He has no beginning; not an angel, created directly out of nothing; not Adam, formed with the mud of the earth; not Eve, taken from Adam; and not even the Incarnate Word, who existed from eternity and is 'conceived' rather than a 'conception'. Prior to conception, the children of Eve did not exist, so they may be better called 'conception'. Yet you differ from them also, for they are conceptions contaminated by original sin, while you are the only Immaculate Conception." Also, in Lourdes, the Immaculata did not define herself as 'Conceived without sin', but, as St. Bernadette herself recounts: "At that moment the Lady was standing above the wild rose bush in the same way in which she is depicted on the Miraculous Medal. Upon my third question her face took on an expression of gravity and at the same time of profound humility… Joining the palms of her hands as if in prayer, she lifted them up to her chest… turned her gaze toward Heaven… then, slowly opening her hands and bowing to me, she said in a voice in which you could notice a slight tremor: 'Que soy era Immaculada Councepsiou!' (I am the Immaculate Conception!')". The whole meaning of the life, sufferings and death of Saint Maximilian was to underline the answer given by the Most Holy Virgin Mary to Bernadette, when she asked the Lady to reveal her name. Saint Maximilian had a desire to live by that answer as well as to feed others with it. Countless times and without rest Saint Maximilian repeated: "The Most Holy Mother, asked by Bernadette what her name was, replied: 'I am the Immaculate Conception'. This is a definition of the Immaculata." In her apparition at Lourdes, in 1858, the Mother of God held in her arms the rosary, and through Bernadette, recommended to us the recital of the Rosary. We can conclude, therefore, that the prayer of the Rosary makes the Immaculata happy. St. Maximilian Maria Kolbe Mugenzai no Sono, before October 1933 Father C.B. Daly The Meaning of Lourdes While Lourdes and its apparitions add nothing to the Church's dogmas, they do deepen our appreciation of her teachings and enliven our response to them. The need for prayer and penance, an awareness of Jesus truly present in the Eucharist, the duty of fraternal charity — all this has ever been part of Christian life. At Lourdes, however, we are confronted with these things anew. Mary there shows us their importance as a mother would, by making them more actual, one might even say tangible. By bringing us face to face with human weakness and misery in the pilgrims who come to that shrine, she pleads that we make prayer and penance, love of Jesus and charity for others the very fabric of our daily existence. It is here that she lets us see the significance of her Immaculate Conception and know the extent of her Co-redemption. The first privilege kept her free from sin and therefore empowered her to love both God and man perfectly. The other gave her the responsibility to aid us, her children, in working towards that same freedom and attaining that same love. Mary's concern at Lourdes is, then, to help us bear witness to the realities that lie hidden in the truths of faith. Lourdes and Revelation In investigating the meaning of Lourdes, one has to begin by eliminating some mistaken hypotheses. We know, for example, from general theological principles, that Lourdes cannot be intended to teach us any new truth about Mary or about the divine plan of salvation. No apparition or private revelation, however approved by the Church, could reveal to us any new truth of faith or morals, or add any truth to what is to be believed by Catholic faith. Pope Benedict XIV, as Cardinal Lambertini, in his classic work on "The Beatification and Canonization of the Servants of God", says, speaking of private revelations: Such an ecclesiastical approbation is nothing else than a permission to publish (a narrative) after mature examination, in view of the instruction and utility of the faithful... The assent of Catholic Faith to revelations thus approved is not merely not obligatory, but is not possible; (such revelations) demand only an assent of human credence in conformance with the rules of human prudence which represents them as probable and piously credible. …. Jean Guitton, speaking of mariophanies and places of Marian pilgrimage, has well said: The veneration of the faithful is not directed to the place itself, but to the mystery that is conceived to be connected with the place... It may happen that the seer of the vision is canonized; if so, it is not for his visions alone, but for the heroic virtues of his life... Suppose the worst: imagine facts come to light which throw serious doubt on the genuineness of the vision... That would take nothing at all from the truths this particular vision represented. These would not depend on any new vision; the Church already possessed them in her deposit of faith. Nor would it detract from the graces received where the vision occurred. These statements only repeat fundamental theses of the theology of faith and of revelation. In their light it is evident that it is only with qualifications that we can speak of Lourdes as having been intended by God as a miraculous confirmation of the truth of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception defined four years earlier by Pope Pius IX. This is indeed a very natural way to speak and it contains important truth. The episcopal document whereby Mgr. Laurence in 1862 gave official ecclesiastical recognition to the apparition already pointed out that, by appearing at Lourdes, and calling for a sanctuary to be built there, Our Lady seemed herself to have wished "to consecrate by a monument the infallible pronouncement of the successor of St. Peter." The popes themselves have spoken in this way. Pope St. Pius X, in his encyclical for the fiftieth anniversary of the Definition of 1854, wrote: Pope Pius IX had hardly defined as of Catholic faith the truth that Mary was from her conception exempt from sin, when there began at Lourdes the marvellous manifestations of Our Lady. Pope Pius XII in his encyclical for the centenary of Lourdes recalled a statement from his earlier encyclical, Fulgens Corona, that the Blessed Virgin Mary herself wished, it would seem, to confirm by a marvellous event the definition which her Son’s Vicar on earth had a short time before proclaimed. However, the Pope in the same centenary encyclical noted that The infallible word of the Roman Pontiff, authentic interpreter of revealed truth, needed no heavenly confirmation in order to command the belief of the faithful. But yet, he continued: With what emotion and what gratitude the Christian people and its pastors received from the lips of Bernadette the reply coming from Heaven, "I am the Immaculate Conception." These words of Pope Pius XII are the most accurate expression of the matter. In one sense Lourdes cannot confirm the truth of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, because we are more sure of the truth of the dogma than we are of the reality of the apparitions. For the former we have divine authority; for the latter we have strictly only human credibility. Yet, in the concrete case, these distinctions seem somewhat academic and unreal. Lourdes does not add any new ground of objective certitude to the dogma of the Immaculate Conception; but it does confirm our personal apprehension of that truth. Perhaps we might use Newman's formula, and say that Lourdes helps to change our attitude towards the dogma from a notional into a real assent. Mary's mission at Lourdes was not to reveal new truths, but to give us a deeper realization of the truths revealed by her Son once and for all time, the truths she kept while on earth and pondered in her heart. It is, therefore, theologically inexact and inadvisable to speak of Lourdes and the other great Marian manifestations of modern times as marking a new and Marian epoch in the economy of redemption. Preachers sometimes speak of this as the Age of Mary and develop their theme by suggesting that God first sent His Son to draw mankind to His love; and when men refused to come to His Son, He in the last times sends them Mary. Frequently implicated with this theme is another and probably more serious aberration which crept into certain mariological expressions and images since the sixteenth century. This trend of thought would have it that, as between Jesus and Mary, Mary provides the pity and the pleas to Jesus for mercy, and Jesus the rigour of divine justice and wrath towards sinners. Such language and imagery are, of course, devotional rather than theological, and it is perhaps unfair to assess them by rigorous theological criteria. Rightly interpreted, the apparitions at Lourdes and a century of Lourdes devotion stand opposed to these aberrant concepts and constitute a recall to the traditional and true theology of Our Lady. "I am the Immaculate Conception" It is natural to look for some centre of unity amid the diversity of facts and words associated with Lourdes. There can be no doubt that this centre was provided by Our Lady herself when on the 25th of March 1858 she at last spoke the word that all had been waiting, praying and hoping for. She spoke her name. She said: "I am the Immaculate Conception." Nothing more surely attests to the doctrinal soundness and the supernatural origin of the apparitions than these words. Bernadette did not know what they meant. Her cousin, Jeanne Vedere, who had the story directly from Bernadette at the time, describes how Bernadette had to repeat the words over and over again on her way to tell them to the Curé for fear of forgetting them; and that when M. Peyramale asked her what the words meant, she confessed that she did not know. This apparition was always the climax of Bernadette's narration of the events of Massabielle. She accompanied her narration with a re-enactment of the gestures of Our Lady as she spoke the words. Our Lady had had her hands joined, with the Rosary hanging from her right arm. In response to Bernadette's thricerepeated appeal to her to declare her name she smiled, then extended her arms downwards in the attitude of the Virgin of the Miraculous Medal, so that the Rosary slipped towards her wrist; then joined her hands again upon her breast and with eyes raised towards Heaven, spoke with indescribable humility and tenderness the words, "I am the Immaculate Conception." Bernadette's repetition of these gestures and words made an unforgettable impression on all who witnessed it. The sculptor, M. Fabisch, who had already executed the statuary of La Salette, and was chosen to make the first statue of Our Lady of Lourdes, came in 1863 to hear from Bernadette herself the description of the Lady of her visions. He asked her to describe the scene of the Lady's self-revelation. He later wrote: The girl stood up with perfect simplicity. She joined her hands and raised her eyes towards Heaven... But neither Fra Angelico, nor Perugino, nor Raphael has ever created anything so gentle, and at the same time so profound as the look of that little girl... I shall never forget, as long as I live, the beauty of that expression. There is no doubt, then, that the sixteenth apparition, and Our Lady's words on that occasion, are the heart of Lourdes and the key to its whole meaning. Bernadette herself, who deplored the fact that too many people skim over the surface of things, remarked: "I would like to see emphasis placed on the apparition in which the Blessed Virgin declared her identity." Everything in the story of Lourdes is related to and made meaningful by the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. The grammar of Our Lady's words is strange and cannot be accidental. The authenticity of the words has been questioned on theological grounds: how could Our Lady be her Immaculate Conception? But the construction surely invites juxtaposition with two sentences from the New Testament. The first is that in which St. Paul says of Our Lord: "Him who knew no sin (God) hath made sin for us, that we might be made the justice of God in him" (2 Cor. 5:21). The second is that in which Our Lady herself says, "Behold the handmaid of the Lord"; in other words, "I am the slave of the Lord; I am nothing but the fulfiller of His will." St. Paul says that God made Christ sin, that we might be made the justice of God in Christ. But in Mary and in her alone the divine plan of redemption is already and fully and finally realized. Through Christ, her Son, she is already made "the justice of God." She is the justice of God accomplished. She is the Immaculate Conception, in whom through Christ sin is totally defeated. Christ was made sin that she might be sinless. Christ was made sin for us; she is made "anti-sin" in order that she may be the model of the sinlessness that we, poor sinners, must painfully, penitentially labour to achieve in Christ. But Mary's sinlessness is not merely a state which she passively receives. It is also a total, dedicated disposition of will which she actively lives and is. In this sense also she is her Immaculate Conception; that is to say, she is the justice of God; she is the complete fulfiller of all the justice of His just will. "I am the Immaculate Conception" was Our Lady's repetition, on the Feast of the Annunciation, 1858, of the words she spoke at the Annunciation itself: "I am the handmaid of the Lord; be it done to me according to Thy word."