next Tuesday 11^th February. Mass will be celebrated at the side altar dedicated to Our Lady of Lourdes in Athboy Church, at 7.30pm on Tuesday evening.

On 11th February 1858 Bernadette Soubirous, her sister Toinette and a friend of theirs, Jeanne, went looking for wood on the meadows along the River Gave in the small village of Lourdes in southern France.  They were in front of the Grotto of Massabielle. Toinette and Jeanne crossed the icy water, crying out with the cold; Bernadette hesitated to do this because of her chronic asthma.  She heard “a noise like a gust of wind”, but “none of the trees were moving”.  “Raising her head, she saw, in a hollow of the rock a small young lady, who looked at her and who smiled at her.  This was the first apparition of the Virgin Mary to Bernadette, in total there were eighteen such apparitions, the final one happened on 16^th July that same year.