2/11/2019 6:20:56 AM
As many as touched him were healed
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Even for restoring the dead to life the Savior did not stop at acting by word alone, though it was the bearer of divine commands. For such a surpassing work he took his own flesh as his assistant – if one might put it that way – that he might show that it has the power to give life and that he might cause it to be seen that it is entirely one with him. For it is indeed his very own flesh and not an alien body. This is what happened when he restored life to the synagogue leader's daughter, saying to her: “My child, arise!” (Mk 5:41). He took her by the hand, as it is written. As God, he gave her back her life by his all-powerful command and animated her also by contact with his holy flesh. Thus he bore witness that, in flesh as in his word, one and the same divine energy was at work. In the same way, too, when he came to a town called Nain where the widow's only son was being buried, he touched the coffin, saying: “Young man, I tell you, arise!” (Lk 7:14). Thus he not only conferred to his word the power to raise the dead, but he even touched the dead to show that his body is life-giving and, through his flesh, he caused life to pass into their corpses. If the touch alone of his sacred flesh restores life to a corrupting body, what profit shall we not discover in his life-giving eucharist when we make of it our food? It will wholly transform into its own property, which is immortality, those who participate in it.
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OUR LADY OF LOURDES
(1858)
In the fourth year after the definition of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, when a certain girl named Bernadette asserted that she had seen the Immaculate Mother of God many times in a rock cavern, on the banks of the river Gave, near the town of Lourdes, in the diocese of Tarbes, in France, so many and great wonders took place that every prudent and devoted follower of Christ could easily know that the finger of God was there. The most famous among these is that sick people who took the water from a spring that had miraculously originated in the grotto were ever so often restored to health.
Reports of the favors which the faithful were said to have received in the sacred grotto had become very widespread, and with the gathering of people increasing daily, the Bishop of Tarbes, after a juridical inquiry into the facts, permitted the religious veneration of this Immaculate Virgin to be held in the grotto itself.
Before long a church was built, and innumerable crowds of the faithful have come there every year, and in time the name of the Immaculate Mother of God has become renowned everywhere in the world; the more so each year, as the procession of the most blessed Sacrament takes place, during which some of the sick who are brought there from all parts of the world seeking health from God through the intercession of his Immaculate Mother, grow well.
Because of all this, Pope Pius X officially extended to the Universal Church this feast which Leo XIII had permitted to be celebrated only in certain places.
Roman breviary