Overview:

The Optional Memorial of St. Margaret Mary Alacoque

A Reflection for the Optional Memorial of St. Margaret Mary Alacoque

“Although you have hidden these things
from the wise and the learned
you have revealed them to the childlike.” (Mt 11:25)

Find today’s readings here.

I sat in the back of the plane during the pope’s return flight from France, listening to the (as it sounds to me) homey midwestern voice of the pope reflect, through crackling airline speakers, that he had experienced “almost miracles” at Lourdes. I felt my eyebrows raise.

There is not much to see in Lourdes. The nature is breathtaking, sure—as we rolled into town past a smattering of people along the countryside highways, I marveled at the rolling Pyrenees growing deep blue and green against the orange sunset. A Missourian never gets used to mountains, I don’t think. At least I haven’t. The town, though, is something else: Neon signs affixed to run-down grey buildings advertise shops where fluorescent lights glare against the plastic Mary bottles waiting to be filled with magic water; melodramatic songs from “Bernadette, The Musical” played on a loop all weekend long. I tried to scold my inner skeptic, lecturing her that St. Bernadette was the patron of people who were “ridiculed for their piety” and that I shouldn’t be one of the ridiculers. It didn’t really work.

Trying to get some color for my story, I followed a little girl running barefoot to where crowds had gathered to see the pope his first evening there. After the popemobile rolled by, I struck up a conversation in my middling French with a father who had brought his six children, two of them disabled, on a long car ride from Limoges that morning. Listening back to my recording of the interview, I realized I had mistakenly asked him not whether he was hoping for the pope to deliver “a message of healing” but just “deliver healing”—as in, do you hope the pope’s visit might heal your disabled children? My heart sank as I heard his response in my headphones: “Yes, absolutely,” he replied. “We’ve come to ask the Virgin Mary for healing, and the pope is here, too. He is, after all, the primary representative of Jesus.”

Over dinner that night, the other journalists and I debated the French euthanasia law that had been passed the previous month, which Pope Leo had criticized indirectly in Paris. The next day, at an outdoor meeting with hundreds of ill and disabled Lourdes pilgrims and their caretakers being cared for at a medical center built “as close as possible” to the famous grotto, the pope delivered a fiery message against the law. For the first time on the trip, the crowd began interrupting him with applause, and his pauses grew longer and his voice stronger in response, booming out across the facade of the medical center, “What is legal is not necessarily moral!”

In the evening, I wandered back down to the grotto—one of my America colleagues had told me that I needed to see one of the famous Lourdes candlelight processions while I was there—and said a quick prayer for my cousin’s newborn son being treated in the NICU. I noticed some Carmelite brothers and approached one to ask about a friend of mine from the congregation whom I hadn’t heard from in years; the monk I spoke to, it turned out, had grown up in the same small town as my friend and knew him well. He gave me a full update: The friend’s cancer was still gone, but now he was away from the community, caring for his ailing parents. Sickness comes for us all, I thought. No wonder a place like Lourdes received a constant flow of pilgrims. There would always be more sickness, always people grasping for hope.

“The four days were literally filled with many blessings,” Leo said on the plane. “Almost miracles, I would say, especially the time at Lourdes, walking with, accompanying so many people who are sick and suffering.” I remembered how, after his speech to the pilgrim-patients from the medical center, Leo had approached everyone in the front row, sometimes wading a few rows back into the crowds to embrace people. They had the childlike faith Jesus described in today’s Gospel, despite many of them feeling constant pain. A disabled woman who had spoken before the pope had described how hard it was for her to find a job until she ended up at Lourdes. She teared up as she talked about finding a sense of purpose working at the center, accompanying and sharing her faith with people who had come to Lourdes for healing.

The pope was still talking as I replayed the event in my head: “Seeing how the grace of God’s presence manifested in many different ways, touches people’s hearts, transforms their lives, and, to use an expression that I mentioned there, restores dignity to the sick, the elderly, those who in some parts of society are discarded….” Maybe that was the miracle. That people discarded by society could find somewhere to belong. That people in the debilitating pain that now qualified them for legal euthanasia would refuse and insist on the dignity of their lives. That I could run into my old friend’s older friend by chance at the grotto, and learn that the cancer that had disappeared without explanation a decade ago hadn’t come back, and receive a text the next day saying my cousin’s baby had improved a little bit.

I don’t think I have the childlike faith to believe that Lourdes water does anything. To be fair, St. Bernadette said she didn’t either—that it came down to faith and prayer, that on its own, the water was just water.

Still, I brought a bottle home.

Colleen Dulle is the Vatican Correspondent at America and co-hosts the "Inside the Vatican" podcast. She is the author of Struck Down, Not Destroyed: Keeping the Faith as a Vatican Reporter (Image, 2025).