In the midst of worldwide demonic infestation, in the wave of popularized occultism (such as Siritualism), Mary came again to France (following LaSalette), appearing to a young girl named Bernadette Soubirous, who had taken to wearing the Miraculous Medal.

The first of 18 apparitions occurred at a shallow cave (or “grotto”) near the River Gave in Lourdes on February 11, 1858.

The Blessed Virgin announced her arrival with the sounds of a storm and Bernadette noticed a rosebush moving strangely. Then she saw a gold-colored cloud drift out of the grotto, followed by the apparition of a young woman above the wind-swept bush. Mary was 16 or 17, dressed in white with a blue sash or girdle. During her apparitions she identified herself as the “Immaculate Conception.” This was important because it was the first affirmation of a declaration that Mary was conceived without original sin.

“Penitence!” she stressed. “Pray for sinners.”

She even asked Bernadette to climb the slope on her knees and kiss the earth as a sign of reverence and sacrifice.

And she imparted a secret that Bernadette never revealed.

Sacrifice was the key. People had to live pure lives—free of the occult and demons. People had to look toward their place in eternity.

“I do not promise to make you happy in this world,” said the Lady, “but in the next.”

In what became a custom of her apparitions, Mary prayed with Bernadette, indicating the rosary as a protection against Satan. “Without thinking of what I was doing, I took my rosary in my hands and went on my knees,” recounted the young visionary. “The Lady made a sign of approval with her head and herself took into her hands a rosary which hung on her right arm. When I attempted to begin the rosary and tried to lift my hand to my forehead, my arm remained paralyzed, and it was only after the Lady had signed herself that I could do the same. The Lady had me pray by myself; she passed the beads of her rosary between her fingers but she said nothing; only at the end of each decade did she say the ‘Gloria’ with me. When the recitation of the Rosary was finished, the Lady returned to the interior of the rock and the golden cloud disappeared with her.”

At a certain moment during the apparitions Bernadette suddenly heard loud shouts, “like the clamor of a bawling crowd,” coming from the area near the river, with one especially furious voice roaring at Bernadette: “Get out! Get out!” It was an attack by demonic spirits who tried to scare her from the grotto. The Virgin Mary merely glanced in their direction and with a simple and yet sovereign look reduced the invisible mob to silence.

Although only a few messages were given at Lourdes, Mary accomplished many things with the famous apparition. She established a presence with storm-like force, barging into a social climate that was increasingly dominated by occultism; she made herself known as the “Immaculate Conception;” she brought forth a miraculous spring of healing waters; and she showed in a very living way that she was in conflict with the devil.

She also tried to give an increasingly rationalistic and occultic world a taste of the right kind of the supernatural.

But Satan was always around and he gained footholds through both Spiritualism and atheism. The devil was working with earnest on the minds of the 19th-century philosophers. He drew them into seeing life as a purely physical event, and he replaced belief in the Creator with belief in Darwinism. The German philosopher Nietzsche soon rose to blaspheme God. He declared that a new “creator” was needed, and pronounced the goal of human existence to be that of evolution into a god-like “superman.” It became fashionable for intellectuals to mock concepts of the real Creator as outdated and simple-minded ideologies.

This was all in Satan’s strategy: negate God through either atheism or occultism—whatever means possible.

[Adapted from The Final Hour]