Lourdes Today: Pilgrimage to Mary's Grotto
by Kerry Crawford
Servant Books, 2008
151 pages, $13.99
To order: servantbooks.org
800-488-0488

Pope Benedict XVI will be in Lourdes, France, at the end of this week. If you are not able to join him — or make a pilgrimage to the Shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes sometime soon — do not despair. In Lourdes Today, Kerry Crawford gives you a firsthand look at the heart and spirit of this magnificent Marian sanctuary.

The book begins appropriately with the story of young Bernadette Soubirous and her meetings with the Blessed Mother in February 1858. While searching for firewood one day with some companions, the sound of a stirring gust caused 14-year-old Bernadette to look up to a nearby cave. There she saw a “Lady dressed in white,” surrounded by light. The Lady appeared to Bernadette and asked her to return to the same spot for 15 days.

Bernadette followed the Blessed Mother’s command despite skeptical clergy, angry policemen and a village overrun with rumors about her and her family. In their meetings, the Lady revealed herself as the Immaculate Conception. The Virgin Mary asked Bernadette to wash her face in miraculous water that sprang from a nearby rock and expressed her desire to have a chapel built at the site.

A century and a half later, Crawford, a Register correspondent, details a shrine where the sick still bathe in the healing waters and where three basilicas grace the sanctuary grounds. While the hope-filled sick and suffering crowd Lourdes daily, the author offers a Lourdes of today that is far from a scene at a dreary hospital ward. Instead, it is very much a place of healing, prayer and inspiration.

Examples of faith in action are easily found chapter after chapter as Crawford introduces the reader to various volunteers and pilgrims who have served at Lourdes. One example is Julie Wlotzko, who as a student assisted in the bath house for women. “Serving at Lourdes affected my prayer. You come to the realization that you encounter Christ in the everyday person,” she said.

Crawford paints a picture of a shrine that is abuzz with spiritual activity from sunrise to sunset: Masses, the Way of the Cross, the nightly candlelight Marian procession. In this regard, a map of the Lourdes shrine would have been a nice addition to the book — to show the reader where and how all of this takes place.

Interestingly, St. Bernadette never returned to the grotto after she entered the convent. In that same spirit, as Crawford notes, all pilgrims to the shrine must too return home. However, Lourdes has become for so many a spiritual home. It is a place where pilgrims have met the Blessed Mother and her son — and a place where sojourners will continue to do so for centuries to come.

Eddie O’Neill writes from

Green Bay, Wisconsin.