Our Lady of Lourdes

O clemens, O pia, O dulcis Virgo Maria. (The Salve Regina) “Not the world cursed, but the world purified!” Such, exclaims Bede Jarrett, O.P., has always been the effect of our Lady, the Blessed Virgin Mary. As in the beginning, when a woman stood by a tree in a garden and a man brought about the curse of the world; so in the mystery of the redemption does a woman stand again by a tree in a garden—yet this time the man is God, and the woman his Mother, and the deed is the salvation of the world. “Not the world cursed, but the world purified,” and so is Mary hailed down the ages by her children as their life, their sweetness, and their hope—even as she renews their devotion with her apparitions as at Lourdes. Preached in the first week of February 1933, at New York’s Church of Our Lady of Lourdes, in preparation for the celebration of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the apparitions at Lourdes, each meditation takes its cue from a separate line of the Salve Regina. Casual but direct, simple but profound—in the words of Rev. Joseph H. McMahon, then-pastor of Our Lady of Lourdes—these meditations carry a sincere mysticism with the power to increase love for the holy Queen of Heaven and bring about a closer union with her Son.