Feb. 11, 2014 Tuesday: Our Lady of Lourdes
One of the first pilgrimages to Lourdes was while I was a university student at Louvain. I had just enough money to go to Lourdes but not enough to live on once I arrived. I asked my brother Tom if he had any money, but he was a typical university student too—no money. I said to him: “Well, if I have faith enough to go to Lourdes to celebrate the fifth anniversary of my Ordination, it is up to the Blessed Mother to get me out.” I arrived in Lourdes “broke.” I went to one of the good hotels—though by no means would any hotel in Lourdes ever be considered in the luxury class. I decided that if the Blessed Mother was going to pay my hotel bill, she could just as well pay a big one as a little one. I made a novena—nine days of prayer—but on the ninth morning nothing happened, the ninth afternoon nothing happened, the ninth evening nothing happened. Then it was serious. I had visions of gendarmes and working out my bill by washing dishes. I decided to give the Blessed Mother another chance. I went to the grotto about ten o'clock at night. A portly American gentleman tapped me on the shoulder: “Are you an American priest?” “Yes.” “Do you speak French?” “Yes.” “Will you come to Paris with my wife and daughter tomorrow, and speak French for us?” He walked me back to the hotel; then he asked me perhaps the most interesting question I have ever heard in my life: “Have you paid your hotel bill yet?” I outfumbled him for the bill. The next day we went to Paris and for twenty years or more after that, when I would go to New York on weekends to instruct converts, I would enjoy the hospitality of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Farrell, who had become the agents of the Blessed Mother to save me from my creditors.
Spiritual aid to needy souls has not kept pace with the material aid we gather for needy bodies. No want of collections exists to help those in body need, but there is a lessened sense of reparation for the spiritually starving. “If one member suffers anything, all the members suffer with it.” If there are eye banks for the blind and blood banks for the anemic, why should there not be prayer banks for the fallen and self-denial banks for sinners? Many a spiritually wounded traveler is without the Good Samaritan to pour the oil of intercession and the wine of reparation into his weary soul. Devotion to the Blessed Mother brought me to the discovery of a new dimension in the sacredness of suffering. I do not believe that I ever in my life said to the Good Lord: “What did I do to deserve all these trials?” In my own heart I knew that I received fewer blows than I deserved. Furthermore, if Christ the Lord had summoned His Mother, who was free from sin, to share in the Cross, then the Christian must scratch from his vocabulary the word “deserve.” When she brought her Divine Child to Simeon she was told He would be a “sign of contradiction” and “a sword would pierce her heart too.” His Mother was the first to feel it—not in the sense of an unwilling victim, but rather one whose free act of resignation made her united to Him as much as a creature could be united with Him in the act of redemption. If I were the only person who had eyes in a world full of blind people, would I not try to be their staff? If I were the only one in a battlefield who was unwounded, would I not try to bind sores? Then shall virtue in the face of sin be dispensed from cooperation with Him Who even paid in advance for her gift of being immaculately conceived?
-Bishop Fulton Sheen, Treasure in Clay: The Autobiography of Fulton J. Sheen
