“TAKE CARE OF HIM” COMPASSION AS A SYNODAL HEALING EXERCISE XXXI WORLD DAY OF THE SICK

“Illness is part of our human condition. Yet, if illness is experienced in isolation and abandonment, unaccompanied by care and compassion, it can become inhumane”. With these words, Pope Francis begins his Message for the 31st World Day of the Sick, celebrated on February 11, the Memorial of Our Lady of Lourdes, who is the patron of the sick and suffering. Pope’s Message, entitled “Take care of him. Compassion as a synodal exercise of healing” is a meditation on the parable of the Good Samaritan that turns our attention to the problem of people who suffer especially in abandonment, who are left behind because they are not productive or useful for others and helps us understand that we all are responsible for caring for and healing one another. Whenever we encounter our brothers and sisters who suffer and open our hearts to them or we ourselves need attention and help, we have a chance to grow. The pope writes: “As the whole Church journeys along the synodal path, I invite all of us to reflect on the fact that it is especially through the experience of vulnerability and illness that we can learn to walk together according to the style of God, which is closeness, compassion, and tenderness”.

The biblical and Christian tradition has always put people who experience suffering in the center of its attention. “Experiences of bewilderment, sickness, and weakness are part of the human journey. Far from excluding us from God’s people, they bring us to the centre of the Lord’s attention, for he is our Father and does not want to lose even one of his children along the way. Let us learn from him, then, how to be a community that truly walks together, capable of resisting the throwaway culture”.

This year we celebrate the 165th anniversary of the apparitions of Mary in Lourdes, France. On February 11, 1858, a 14-year-old Bernadette Soubirous, searching for firewood together with her sister and a friend, saw a beautiful young Lady by the Massabielle grotto, just outside the city of Lourdes. The Lady was wearing a white dress and veil, a blue girdle; she had a golden rose on each foot and held a rosary of pearls. She told Bernadette to pray for sinners. Her message was one of call for penance and conversion. She also asked to build a chapel on that place. When being asked her name, she said: “I am the Immaculate Conception”. There were a total of 18 apparitions from February 11-July 16, 1858.

Miracles happened on the place of the apparitions: Bernadette was instructed by the Lady to drink at the fountain and wash herself; seeing no fountain, she took muddy water from what was a very little puddle close to the grotto. There was more and more clean water as Bernadette continued to dig; on the next day, a spring began to flow there. The first healing happened on the following day when a man with an eye knocked out, praying by the Massabielle grotto, washed in the spring and miraculously regained his eye and eyesight. More people experienced healings after having washed in the waters of the Massabielle stream. Over the years, Lourdes have become the world-wide Marian shrine for the sick. At present, some 6 million pilgrims visit Lourdes each year to pray and seek healing. St. John Paul II initiated celebration of the World Day of the Sick in 1992 on the feast our Our Lady of Lourdes, stating that “precisely Lourdes, a Marian shrine so dear to the Christian people, is a place and symbol of hope and grace, a sign of accepting and offering the salvific suffering”.

Pope Francis at the conclusion of his Message reminds that, “on 11 February 2023, let us turn our thoughts to the Shrine of Lourdes, a prophetic lesson entrusted to the Church for our modern times. It is not only what functions well or those who are productive that matter. Sick people, in fact, are at the centre of God’s people, and the Church advances together with them as a sign of a humanity in which everyone is precious and no one should be discarded or left behind”.
Our Lady of Lourdes, Health of the Sick, pray for us!

~Fr. Cyprian Czop, OMI