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Soubirous, 1844–1879
    These are all ancient stories. But the allure of holy wells and their sacred waters remains strong today, exercising a powerful attraction on believers. And nowhere is this clearer than in Lourdes, France.
    Lying in the foothills of the Pyrenees in southwestern France, Lourdes was, for centuries, merely a small market town. Dominated by the fortified castle rising in its midst, the town’s population counted a modest four thousand people through the middle of the nineteenth century. On February 11, 1858, though, this all changed. A poor fourteen-year-old girl, Bernadette Soubirous, was walking through the town’s untended outskirts, looking for firewood and bones within an area commonly used as a garbage dump. Pausing to cross a stream beside a small cave known as the grotto of Massabielle, she had a vision of a dazzling light and a beautiful woman. Her companions saw nothing.
    Returning to the grotto a few days later, she had another vision. In all, Soubirous experienced eighteen visions of the white-veiledlady, who later described herself as the Immaculate Conception. This figure was interpreted by the villagers as the Virgin Mary.
    The mystic lady’s messages were different each time, calling for penance, for a chapel to be built on the site, and, later, for Bernadette “to drink of the water of the Spring, to wash in it, and to eat of the herb that grew there.” This seemed impossible, since the only water to be found in the grotto was in the moist mud. Following instructions only she could hear, Bernadette clawed in the mud and tried to drink the dirt-filled water. She seemed crazy. The next day, however, it was reported that clear water flowed from the grotto. This spring later became the source of the famed water of Lourdes, drastically changing the town’s future.
    Needless to say, there were many skeptics at the time of Bernadette’s claims and since then. She was first denounced as deranged or a fraud, but after multiple interviews church officials became convinced, finding her story credible both because of her unwavering conviction and because they concluded the poor, uneducated girl could never have known about the theology of the Immaculate Conception.
    Soubirous died in 1879 and following her death the fame of her story only continued to grow. A group of admirers soon began to push for her canonization as a saint. Her body was exhumed three times to seek evidence for sainthood, and each time it showed remark ably little decomposition, seen as proof of her incorruptibility. Having satisfied the Church’s requirement for three miracles, she was officially declared Saint Bernadette by Pope Pius XI in 1933. Her body has been on constant display in a glass coffin in the Sisters of Charity Convent in Nevers, France, since 1925.
    Visitors started coming to Lourdes for its waters shortly after Bernadette’s claims. Some come in the hope that the waters will cure an ailment, others just for the chance to bathe in or drink such holy waters. The town now hosts roughly five million visitors a year with seven churches and upward of 270 hotels—incredibly, the greatest concentration of hotel rooms in France outside of Paris. Streets are filled with shops catering to the trade, with all manner of Lourdes-emblazoned statuettes, jewelry, and bottles of water. It’s estimated that pilgrims contribute up to $300 million to the local economy. The holy and mercantile exist alongside one another in an uneasy pairing. The English journalist Malcolm Muggeridge derided the commerce as “tawdry relics, the bric-a-brac of piety.”

    Holy water bottles on sale in Lourdes, France
    Nor is the commerce limited to purchases on site. The website directfromlourdes.com , for example, offers a range of Lourdes bottled water to those who cannot make the journey. The marketing pitch takes in both holy and practical concerns: “We are one of the only stores to sell bottles containing fresh water from the spring.