16 How the Church Has Changed the World admit that she had been responsible for any cures. She refused all money. She wanted only to obey the lady, and to study for her First Communion. The fortnight passed. The Soubirous family was as poor as ever. Lourdes was thronged with visitors. Bernadette had returned to her ordinary life. Then onMarch 25, she heard the call again, and this time the lady revealed her name, in the girl’s dialect. Tell the priest, she said, Que soy era Immaculada Councepciou: “I am the Immaculate Conception.” Bernadette rehearsed the strange words on her way to the priest. She didn’t knowwhat they meant. Pope Pius IX had recently declared as a matter of faith that Mary had been conceived without taint of original sin. Bernadette did not know that. The priest did—and he was stunned. How shall I put these things together? A young man with his hip devoured by cancer enters the waters of Lourdes. He has, on one side, no hip at all. When he returns from Lourdes, he begins again to walk and run as he used to do. X-rays show that there is no more sarcoma. Instead there is a hip, sound and sure. Where did that come from? You can’t persuade your body to make new tissue out of nothing. The new bone came from the smallest of places, that mustard seed, that leaven. What lies within the smallest of the seeds? God Almighty does: the power that made the universe from nothing, the
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