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The Lourdes Grotto
The abbot met a nurse in the hospital at Miramichi who said she just loved coming out to the monastery. He was thinking that we never saw here when she explained that she came to pray at
the grotto and found it so peaceful. Our grotto is a pretty good reminder of the grotto at Lourdes in the South West of France where
Mary appeared to Bernadette in 1858 and which is now one of the Catholic Church’s major pilgrim centres. Why is our grotto such a good reproduction. Well, because
it is built into the natural rock of the hillside and the river runs in front of it in the right direction, just like the
gave in Lourdes. It is a place to pray to the Mother of God, to ask her intercession
for your needs, above all to ask her to show you the way to her Son, Jesus. The
Lourdes Grotto at Calvary Abbey was erected in 1968. The grounds around the grotto
are currently kept in trim by a volunteer group, Les Amis des Trappistes. A
Mass is normally celebrated at the Grotto on a Sunday in July, enabling people to make their pilgrimage in union with the
pilgrims of Lourdes.
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At the end of Compline, the singing of
the great antiphon, Salve Regina, is universal in all Cistercian monasteries and has been since their beginning in
1098. At Calvary Abbey the Salve Regina is sung sometimes in Latin, sometimes
in French. So that our day of prayer ends, O clement, O loving, O sweet Virgin
Mary. O clemens, O pia, O dulcis, Virgo Maria.
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