Pope Leo’s Itinerary Includes a Visit to Blessed Fulton Sheen’s Favorite Marian Shrine| National Catholic Register

Pope Leo XIV will visit Lourdes this weekend, just days after the beatification of Bishop Fulton Sheen. Considering the many places Blessed Fulton visited, Lourdes was his favorite Marian shrine.

“Of all the places on earth, to me the three most precious are Rome, where the successor of St. Peter, the Vicar of Christ, continues to feed the lambs and sheep of Christ; the Holy Land, on which once trod the feet of the Word of God made man; and Lourdes, the shrine of Our Lady at the base of the Pyrenees,” he wrote in his autobiography, Treasure in Clay, adding, “During my life I have made about 30 pilgrimages to the shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes.” He would never visit Europe without making a pilgrimage there.

One of his first pilgrimages to Lourdes was while studying at Louvain in Belgium. In 1924, he had only enough money to get there. He told his brother, as recalled in his autobiography, “Well, if I have faith enough to go to Lourdes to celebrate the fifth anniversary of my Ordination, it is up to the Blessed Mother to get me out.”

He stayed at one of the better hotels and made a novena, but on the ninth day, he still needed to pay the bill — and sought out Mary once again. 

He wrote, “I decided to give the Blessed Mother another chance. I went to the grotto about ten o’clock at night. A portly American gentleman tapped me on the shoulder: ‘Are you an American priest?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Do you speak French?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Will you come to Paris with my wife and daughter tomorrow, and speak French for us?’ He walked me back to the hotel; then he asked me perhaps the most interesting question I have ever heard in my life: ‘Have you paid your hotel bill yet?’”

The Blessed Mother came to the rescue through the kindness of this fellow pilgrim. Blessed Fulton became friends with the family who “had become the agents of the Blessed Mother to save me from my creditors.”

A White Rose and ‘Soul in Need’

Archbishop Sheen related other stories that only hint at the many blessing he encountered at Lourdes. Finishing his studies at Louvain, he wrote that he “was deeply concerned that perhaps I would not be permitted to return to Mary’s Shrine again, for I knew not to what task the Bishop would assign me. I asked the Blessed Mother to give me some sign that despite the odds of returning to Lourdes, she would do what seemed impossible. The sign I asked for was this: that after I offered the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and before I would reach the outer gate of the shrine, a little girl aged about 12, dressed in white, would give me a white rose.”

No one was around as he neared the gate. But as he approached, “a little girl aged 12, dressed in white, gave me the white rose.”

In Peoria, Illinois, when he told the pastor of the parish he was assigned to that he would be going to Lourdes the next year, the pastor wondered how this “curate” expected that to happen. But it did. The bishop assigned him in 1926 to teach at The Catholic University of America in Washington — and he “‘could go to Europe to begin immediate preparations’ for his course.”

In incidents such as these with their answered prayer, theologian and leading Sheen authority Peter Howard  told the Register, “We see the special, loving relationship that Sheen has with our Blessed Mother.”

Both marked another Lourdes request Blessed Fulton made and would say, “If anyone thinks that prayers are never answered, let him offer a prayer to the Lord that some suffering be sent to save a soul.”

Before he was to leave on a night train to Paris, as he recounted in his autobiography, he “hurried to the grotto and asked the Blessed Mother to send me some kind of trial and suffering or a splinter from the Cross to help a soul. I hurried to the hotel and ran up three flights of stairs.” Someone ran after him. On the third floor he turned to ask a young Dutch girl, “Are you following me?” “Yes,” she said, “but I do not know why. I saw you in the procession this afternoon and decided that I should talk to you.” She said she was an atheist.

He insisted she was not, “otherwise you would not be here. More likely you have lost your faith.” He said to her, “I believe you are an answer to my prayer. I asked for some trial and suffering to save a soul; you are that soul.”

He missed the train to remain in Lourdes three days “until she made her confession and was restored again to the life of the Church,” he recalled in his autobiography. His difficulties in reaching Paris included another delay of three more days because of multiple inconveniences, travel errors and hardships. But his requested Lourdes experience showed “it is also possible for any cell-member of Christ’s Mystical Body to apply his splinter of the Cross to some other soul in need.”

Howard told the Register that not only did Blessed Fulton Sheen bring this young person back to the faith, “that act actually saved her physical life too because people on her pilgrimage went off a cliff in the Pyrenees mountains when she was with Sheen.”

‘I Become a Pilgrim’

 Archbishop Sheen’s devotion to Lourdes also affected his assistant and friend Msgr. Hilary Franco. “He had this great devotion to the Blessed Mother, so much so that in all his bestsellers, the first page is dedicated to the Blessed Mother with beautiful titles,” Msgr. Franco told the Register. “But Lourdes had a special time. This is really a personal thing because it changed my life.”

As a young priest serving in a parish in the Bronx, he recalled, he asked to see then-Bishop Sheen, national director of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, to discuss the bishop’s book Communism and the Conscience of the West. The appointment was for Aug. 29, 1959, shortly after “the bishop had been in Lourdes in July 1959.”

That meeting led to his becoming Bishop Sheen’s assistant, beginning with preparatory commissions for the Second Vatican Council and then assisting him at the international missionary society.

“Lourdes for him had a special kind of love,” recalled Msgr. Franco. “His devotion to Our Lady of Lourdes was incredible. Lourdes was No. 1 on this list.” After he became Sheen’s associate, they traveled as pilgrims. “We went together several times over to Lourdes.”

In his book Bishop Sheen: Mentor and Friend, Msgr. Franco recounts Sheen “acknowledges Lourdes is his favorite. He says he can’t explain its power over him, but the feeling is genuine and important to him.”

Msgr. Franco wrote how on one of their Marian trips during the course of Vatican II, Bishop Sheen told him he never tired of this pilgrimage. 

“I never fail to come away with a sense of peace, reconciliation and healing,” he said. “There are many who come in hope of a miraculous cure, but even more come who are like us, ‘well and healthy,’ believers who become more grateful for the many blessings which God has bestowed on them and more aware of His goodness toward all of creation. The truly remarkable thing about this pilgrimage to this small town in the Pyrenees is that everyone who visits comes away with the feeling that they have been healed, touched and loved by God. … All are equal in God’s eyes. As for me, I become a pilgrim and forget for a while that I am a bishop.”

Lourdes Counters Modern World

Howard, founder and president of the Fulton Sheen Institute and Fulton Sheen Movement, explained that, in The World’s First Love, Blessed Fulton, who “was always looking for the theological sense of history,” gives greater insight into the connection that he saw with Lourdes, “especially with the age in which we’re living … and the significance of Mary and her revelation of who she is as the Immaculate Conception.” Mary appeared to St. Bernadette Soubirous in 1858, and “the modern philosophies were launched at that time. Basically, Lourdes is where the Church answered the modern world. That’s how he saw it and the way he describes it.”

In The World’s First Love  Sheen explained, “The definition of the Immaculate Conception was made when the Modern World was born. Within five years of that date, and within six months of the apparition of Lourdes where Mary said, ‘I am the Immaculate Conception,’ Charles Darwin wrote his Origin of Species, Karl Marx completed his Introduction to the Critique of the Philosophy of Hegel (‘Religion is the opium of the people’), and John Stuart Mill published his Essay on Liberty. At the moment the spirit of the world was drawing up a philosophy that would issue in two World Wars in 21 years, and the threat of a third, the Church came forward to challenge the falsity of the new philosophy.”

Howard said that “Sheen saw what God revealed through Mary — ‘I am the Immaculate Conception’ — as being the answer to all of those errors that are going to define what the modern world has been battling ever since. She completely obliterates all three of those philosophies in one statement.”

Also in The World’s First Love, along with his three favorite places, Blessed Fulton mentions Fatima fourth, where he visited about 10 times. He also seems to find a Lourdes-Fatima connection in answer to those false philosophies.

He noted, “The difference between Fatima and Lourdes is that Lourdes is the place of faith and Fatima is the scene of penance.” He made clear, “At Lourdes, three times the Blessed Mother said: ‘Penance, penance, penance.’ At Fatima, the same penitential antiphon is struck time and time again.”

Looking back to Blessed Fulton Sheen’s own stories of Lourdes, Howard finds one more revelation on why this was his favorite place. “In some of his stories about Lourdes we see his childlike love,” he said, recalling the answer to one of Sheen’s fervent requests from his heavenly Mother.

“All of a sudden this little girl wearing a white dress runs out, gives him a rose. It’s incredible. We see the love. We see the special, loving relationship that Sheen has with our Blessed Mother.”