There can be few people in the Diocese of Lansing more grateful to Our Lady of Lourdes upon her feast day, February 11, than Jim Paul and his wife, Lenore, pictured above, from DeWitt Township, who credit the Blessed Virgin for saving Jim from both cancer and a stroke. Ave Maria!
“I was diagnosed four times with kidney cancer. Doctors gave me only a 6% chance of survival, yet three years ago I got the all clear — I truly believe that Our Lady of Lourdes has been helping me all along,” explains 65-year-old Jim who is a father-of-two.
“The first time Jim got a diagnosis in 2010 at the University of Michigan,” explains Lenore, “we were on our way back from Ann Arbor and I felt we had to pray. I saw a steeple in the distance. Jim said, ‘It could be any church,’ but I said, ‘I think it’s a Catholic church,’ and, so, we drove there. It was Saint Joseph in Dexter.”
“There we found a shrine to Our Lady of Lourdes next to the church. We prayed there and asked for Mary’s intercession. Long story short, he has come through four surgeries, and we really and truly believe it has been Our Lady of Lourdes who has protected him. We are so thankful to her, especially on this, her feast day.”
Today marks the day in 1858 when the Blessed Virgin Mary first appeared to 14-year-old Bernadette Soubirous in the southern French village of Lourdes. Since then, Lourdes has become a place of pilgrimage with countless claims of physical and spiritual healings, many of which have been authenticated by the Church.
Numbered among those claimants are Jim and Lenore. That includes gratitude for a more recent incident last month, when Jim had a stroke that left him struggling with speech, sight, and standing. Lenore prayed to Our Lady of Lourdes and doused her husband with holy water from the French shrine. One month later, with ongoing prayer, Jim has made great progress and, says, Lenore "is now about 95% of where he was before the stroke".
“Thank you, Our Lady!” Lenore adds.
The replica of the Lourdes grotto in Dexter was erected in 1937 under the direction of the then pastor, Reverend Charles T. Walsh RIP, and as a memorial to the dead of the parish. The shrine is of field stone while the two statues — Our Lady and Saint Bernadette — are of Carrara marble, imported from Carrara in Italy.
Our Lady of Lourdes, pray for us.
