On February 11, 1858, a poor 14-year-old shepherd girl named Bernadette Soubirous was collecting firewood near Lourdes, France. She saw a bright light, and Mary appeared before her in a natural hollow of rock in a cave on the shore of a river.

Mary appeared with a youthful face, and she wore a white garment with a blue belt and carried a rosary. Over the course of 18 appearances, she identified herself as the Immaculate Conception. Mary told Bernadette to drink from a spring within the cave and to tell Church authorities to build a shrine on the site. Since those appearances, more than 200 million pilgrims have visited Lourdes, many reporting cures from the miraculous spring.

Father Sorin visited Lourdes, France, on one of his many trips back to France in the late 1800s to confer with the Holy Cross community. He was moved by the display of faith he saw there and began conversations at Notre Dame to construct a replica shrine on campus.

Notre Dame’s Grotto was constructed in 1896 (after Sorin’s death) and replicates the shrine at Lourdes on a one-seventh scale. A stone from Lourdes is implanted in the Grotto wall. The other boulders were unearthed from nearby farm fields, some weighing two or three tons. Workers, in digging the foundation, opened a spring of water in the same relative position as the miraculous spring that emerged at Lourdes–that spring now flows through the fountain on the left side of the Grotto.

In addition to the Grotto, Our Lady of Lourdes is depicted in a large mural in the Basilica.

Our Lady of Lourdes, who brings healing and hope to your children in France and throughout the world—pray for us!