Did you know that from Massabielle’s cave, in the Sanctuary of Lourdes (France), a water springs with which many miracles have been done?
The sanctuary describes in its website What pilgrims should know about that water, in view of the fact that on Tuesday, February 11, the feast of the Virgin of Lourdes and the 33rd World Day of the patient.
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It all started on Thursday, February 25, 1858, when the Virgin Mary told the seer Santa Bernardita Soubirous: “Go to drink and wash at the source.”
From that day, millions of people arrive in Lourdes to “drink and wash in that water, which has no therapeutic or specific properties.” Santa Bernardita itself used to say: “They drink water as if it were a medicine … you have to have faith, you have to pray: this water would not have any virtue without faith!”
Lourdes’ water is a normal, slightly calcareous and comparable water to any other nearby spring water. It is independent of the Gave de Pau River – which passes through the city where the sanctuary is located – and is driven by channels towards deposits to feed the different taps and pools of the sanctuary.
The gesture of drinking and washing your face can be done personally with the spring water that sprouts in the 18 sources located next to the grotto.
The number 18 recalls the number of appearances of the Virgin, who appeared to the saint as the “Immaculate Conception.”
The taps located near the arches of the Rosary Basilica have enough water to fill the pilgrim containers. Lourdes’ water is free and can freely access it in the sources of the sanctuary.
The sanctuary also states that Lourdes’ water “cannot be sold.”
Shortly before the start of the Covid pandemic, a review was carried out to the channels that carry the spring water to the pools and fountains in the Sanctuary of Lourdes, which made the so -called “water gesture” be modified: the patients They no longer immerse themselves in the so -called pools but take the water three times: once to wash their face, a second for the hands and a third to drink it.
That way of performing the water gesture has been maintained so far.
In the Sanctuary of the Virgin of Lourdes thousands of miracles have been carried out, linked to the use of water. However, the sanctuary only officially recognizes 71 of these miracles.
Walter Sánchez Silva
I am husband since 2008. With my wife we have three children here and one who went to heaven in 2023, before birth. Since I joined ACI Press in 2005, I have had the opportunity to cover various events of the Catholic Church. Among them, the World Youth Days in Colonia, Madrid and Rio de Janeiro and the apostolic trips of Pope Benedict XVI to Mexico and Pope Francis to South Korea. I have been sent to the Vatican to cover the family’s synods, in 2015; of the Amazon, in 2019 and that of Sinodality, in 2023. I follow the situation of the Catholic Church in Nicaragua, which suffers the persecution of the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega, as well as the ecclesial news in the region.