The Lourdes File

A 34-year-old French woman with clinically confirmed multiple sclerosis recovered completely after bathing at Lourdes in May 1952, with the cure recognized as miraculous in 1956 after a four-year follow-up confirmed no relapse.

By 2008, Antonietta Raco's legs had stopped answering her — years of creeping weakness had narrowed to a diagnosis of primary lateral sclerosis, incurable and progressive. The next spring she was lowered into the baths at Lourdes, where she later said a young voice told her three times not to be afraid.

The body of the Lourdes visionary, displayed at Nevers, is often called incorrupt — but a wax mask covers the face, and natural preservation can account for the rest.

Her home town of Paternò raised the money to send twelve-year-old Delizia Cirolli — a bone cancer in her leg, about six months to live — to Lourdes in August 1976, and she came home no better. By winter she could no longer walk and weighed twenty-two kilograms; then, a few days before Christmas, she began on her own to eat and to walk again.

An Austrian woman with documented Addison's disease — chronic adrenal insufficiency — experienced complete and lasting recovery after bathing at Lourdes on August 12, 1950, recognized as miraculous by the Archbishop of Vienna.

Ten years of bone tuberculosis had spread from Elisa Aloi's knee to her hips and spine, and she arrived at Lourdes in June 1958 encased in plaster from pelvis to foot, four fistulae still draining. Ten days after she returned to Sicily, her surgeon wrote in her clinical record that she had come back "completely cured."

An Italian farmer given months to live with advanced Hodgkin's disease rose from his stretcher after immersion in the Lourdes baths in June 1950 and was declared completely well within three days.

Twenty months bedridden after a train wreck, fed through a tube and down to about seventy-eight pounds, Gabriel Gargam was carried into Lourdes on a stretcher against medical advice. During the procession of 20 August 1901 he rose, walked a few steps, and asked for a full meal — and sixty physicians present that day examined him the same afternoon.

After eleven years of illness, thirteen operations, and three months of near-coma, Jeanne Fretel was carried on a stretcher into a Mass at Lourdes, where a priest placed a fragment of the host in her mouth. Seconds later she opened her eyes and began to speak; within hours she was eating and walking.

John Traynor's right arm had been dead, in his own words, since a bullet severed its nerves at Gallipoli — four operations failed to rejoin them, and by 1923 he was judged incurable. He joined Liverpool's first pilgrimage to Lourdes anyway, and during the procession the arm moved for the first time in eight years; within days he was walking.

A Lourdes quarryman blind in one eye from a mining accident washed in the spring water and immediately recovered full sight — the first cure officially recognized by the Church.

Gathering firewood outside Lourdes in February 1858, the fourteen-year-old daughter of an impoverished former miller said she saw, in the grotto of Massabielle, a small young woman in white with a blue sash. Told to dig in the muddy ground, Bernadette uncovered a spring — one that still flows, and that two hundred million pilgrims have since followed her to.

A French man with advanced multiple sclerosis recovered after a 1987 Lourdes pilgrimage — recognized as a miracle in 1999 after a twelve-year medical review.

A dying 23-year-old woman with advanced peritoneal tuberculosis appeared to recover instantly at Lourdes, witnessed and documented by Dr. Alexis Carrel, later winner of the 1912 Nobel Prize in Medicine.

Arachnoiditis had taken Marie Bigot's sight, her hearing, and the use of one side of her body, and her first trip to Lourdes, in October 1952, changed none of it. On her second trip she walked again; on her third, her hearing returned at the close of the procession — and her sight came back on the train home.

A Belgian farm laborer with a compound leg fracture unhealed for eight years claimed instant healing at a replica Lourdes shrine in Oostakker, Belgium — but post-mortem bone examination introduced serious doubts.

A French man with six years of recurring right-sided paralysis and vision loss from bilateral carotid artery disorders felt sudden warmth and complete recovery at Lourdes in 1970 — recognized in 1978 but disputed by American neurologists.

Sister Bernadette Moriau had worn orthopedic braces and taken morphine for a twisted lower body since the 1960s — four spinal operations behind her, a wheelchair beneath her. One July evening in 2008, home from a pilgrimage to Lourdes, she felt a warmth move through her — and that night she reached down and took the braces off.

In the spring of 1963, a young Italian soldier was carried into Lourdes in a plaster cast, a sarcoma having eaten so much of his hip that his surgeons had stopped offering to operate. What happened over the months that followed, his doctors did not have to take on faith — they had it on film, in a sequence of X-rays showing the destroyed bone rebuilding itself.