POPE IN FRANCE/V - The (silent) mission of Lourdes: “God’s charity does not heal those who have no wounds”

by Marie-Lucile Kubacki

Lourdes (Fides News Agency) – Just a few weeks ahead of Pope Leo XIV’s visit to the Shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes, scheduled for September 26 and 27, excitement is palpable in the Marian city, which is already overwhelmed with reservations.
Registration has already closed, and the shrine expects around 150,000 people to attend the various events during the Pope’s visit, an exceptional turnout. Once there, the Pope will pray at the Grotto, celebrate Sunday Mass on the shrine grounds, meet the sick and those accompanying them at the Accueil Notre-Dame, and then take part in the recitation of the Rosary and the Marian torchlight procession. In short, the Pontiff will follow in the footsteps of the approximately three million visitors who walk through the shrine each year.
“There is great joy in our hearts,” Father Jean-Xavier Salefran, a priest of the Community of Saint Martin and vice-rector of the shrine, tells Fides. Present in Lourdes since 2015, after years of ministry in the dioceses of Fréjus-Toulon and Perpignan, he describes the mobilization of the entire community that welcomes visitors: shrine staff, priests, religious, volunteers, members hospital members, and pilgrims. “We are all aware that we are facing a very important event, not only for the shrine, but for the Church in France and for the whole Church.”
For the vice-rector, Leo XIV’s arrival is awaited as a “moment of grace”, continuing the visits of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. But it also represents a concrete responsibility: welcoming a considerable crowd while preserving what is distinctive about Lourdes, namely its closeness to the most vulnerable.

A “concrete” Church

While each phase of the Pope’s journey embodies a particular face of the Church in France (see Fides articles dedicated to Saint-Denis and Metz), “what is special about Lourdes is that here one experiences the Church in its concrete reality, the People of God with all its components,” explains Father Jean-Xavier Salefran.
According to him, the shrine is a place of popular devotion where “the Church in its diversity, in its universality becomes visible,” with the sick, bishops, families, young people, volunteers, diocesan groups and pilgrims from many countries. Every face of the Church is represented here, in a rich social and cultural mingling. It is not unusual to encounter Tamils in traditional dress drawing water from the spring with their hands and pouring it over their hair, or Muslim women praying to Mary, alongside the old blue carts inherited from the place’s spa tradition.
This diversity entails a missionary responsibility: to offer each person, with simplicity, the signs and language of faith, and then accompany those who wish to go further. “The Christian faith is expressed through gestures that are very accessible, very simple and yet very profound,” the vice-rector emphasizes. Touching the rock of Massabielle, drinking water from the spring, making the gesture of washing with water, lighting a candle, taking part in a procession: these gestures, familiar in Lourdes, engage body and spirit at the same time.
They are not a solitary experience, Father Jean-Xavier insists, but part of a “truly ecclesial” journey. The spring revealed by Bernadette Soubirous thus becomes a sign of a divine grace that is “always the same and always new”.
This embodied pedagogy reaches people of very different cultures, religious backgrounds and wounds. The shrine has long welcomed a strong international presence, which has grown over the decades, particularly from Asia and Latin America.
Increasingly, the shrine welcomes visitors who do not necessarily arrive as part of a traditional diocesan pilgrimage: individuals, families, young people, tourists searching for meaning, and men and women who no longer have a regular connection with a Christian community. The pastoral challenge is precisely to welcome this diversity without reducing Lourdes to a mere tourist destination or a vague form of spirituality.

Bernadette, a gateway

In this mission of welcome and first proclamation, the figure of Bernadette remains central.
“She is a witness who still speaks today with just as much force,” the vice-rector observes. The young girl from Lourdes, confronted with poverty, illness, lack of education and the incomprehension provoked by her testimony, speaks in a particular way to young people and to those going through difficult moments.
“A gateway is precisely the trials Bernadette herself went through,” he explains. Young people are also struck by “her frankness, her purity, her courage” in recounting what she had seen and heard: a certain transparency before God’s grace.
Bernadette is not presented as a distant or flawless figure: she also knew personal struggles and had an impulsive temperament. But she had learned, she used to say, to allow the “second impulse” – the impulse of grace and reason – to prevail over the immediate reaction.
The shrine therefore invites visitors to follow in Bernadette’s footsteps and rediscover her story each day. Recounting the apparitions, recalling the words attributed to the Virgin Mary and helping people understand the meaning of these places already provides, according to Father Jean-Xavier, a first catechesis.
“In recounting and quoting the words of the Virgin Mary, catechesis is already taking place.”

A spontaneous, rather than “organized”, flow

The vice-rector notes that many people who come to Lourdes have not been directly contacted by pastoral workers.
“They come because they need something real, something solid; they no longer know ‘a priori’ whom to entrust themselves to,” he says. In his view, “the Virgin Mary has drawn them here”.
The response offered by the shrine therefore takes the form of a gradual accompaniment. At first, some are content simply to visit the Grotto, to look, to listen, and to make a gesture of prayer. Others embark on a “journey of grace”, which enables them to visit the shrine, understand its symbols and be accompanied through the gestures associated with light, water and rock.
This journey often paves the way to a personal encounter with a priest and, for many, to a rediscovery of the Sacrament of Reconciliation.
“We have so, so, so many people coming to confession,” Father Jean-Xavier emphasizes. “It turns out that this sacrament responds to a very important need today’: the longing for mercy, inner peace and renewal.
Not without emotion, he recalls a man who had cycled to Lourdes after enduring numerous trials. That man told him that he needed to “rebuild his life on something true and solid”. Having laid down his burden, he set off again with the feeling that he was “learning how to live again”. For the vice-rector, such stories bear witness to the inner and spiritual healings of which Lourdes is a daily witness, without these diminishing the significance of physical suffering or the reality – sometimes long and difficult – of illness.

The most vulnerable at the forefront

The Pope’s forthcoming visit will explicitly highlight this essential aspect. On September 27, Leo XIV will meet hospital staff and patients staying at the Accueil Notre-Dame, a facility specifically designed for pilgrims who are unable to care for themselves or who have disabilities. “I have high hopes for the Pope’s gestures,” says Father Jean Xavier. The vice-rector hopes above all that the Holy Father will reaffirm “the importance and place of vulnerable people, of the sick, at the heart of the Church and at the heart of the world”.
In a society marked by the cult of efficiency, loneliness and fear of vulnerability, Lourdes reminds us that the sick are not people to be marginalized, but witnesses who teach something crucial about the human condition.
This priority is expressed through the service of the hospital workers, where the line between those who help and those who receive help is often blurred.
“Those who come to serve the sick often discover that they themselves are sick, in their own way,” the vice-rector observes.
The gratuitousness of service, closeness to frail bodies, shared prayer and concrete attention to each person thus become a form of mission.
Father Jean-Xavier also recalls the story of a pregnant woman who had been told that the child she was carrying was ill. She came to ask for a blessing and to seek guidance in facing a painful decision. In the end, she chose to welcome her child.
She later testified that her stay in Lourdes had given her the strength to love and welcome him.
“She was carrying a trial within her, and in that trial she found a light,” he recounts.
In Lourdes, mission is not a program but a presence: the presence of a Church that welcomes, listens, prays and serves; of believers who make their care for others visible; of sick people whose vulnerability challenges the certainties of an individualistic world; of healthy people who discover that they too are wounded; and of sick people who find themselves inwardly, and sometimes physically, uplifted.
It is the opposite of what Charles Péguy called “accustomed souls”, of whom he wrote: “Because they are not wounded, they are not vulnerable. Since they lack nothing, nothing is brought to them. Since they lack nothing, what is everything, is not brought to them. Not even the charity of God heals those who have no wounds.” To go to Lourdes means going to the source of the urgent human need to be saved.
(Fides News Agency, 11/9/2026)

Share:

papa leone xiv

---

---

mission

---

---

sanctuaries

---

---

marian devotion

---

---

diseases

---

---

charity

---

---