In this chair
The first pope in centuries to resign. Went as a pilgrim to Manoppello and to Lourdes. A teacher on the chair.
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Pope Benedict the Sixteenth
Bishop of Rome, 2005 – 2013
Signs of this pontificate
Wonders this archive keeps that belong to the years he sat, or that he himself stood before.
ImageOpen / under study
The Holy Face of Manoppello
Manoppello, AbruzzoDocumented in Manoppello from 1506; claimed older
A translucent cloth in a Capuchin church, visible from both sides, bearing a living face that some identify with the Veil of Veronica or the burial face-cloth (sudarium). Benedict XVI visited it in 2006. No decree of authenticity.
MarianChurch-approved
Our Lady of Lourdes
Massabielle, Lourdes1858
Between 11 February and 16 July 1858, in a limestone cave on the edge of Lourdes that the town used as a rubbish dump, a fourteen-year-old miller’s daughter named Bernadette Soubirous saw a young woman in white eighteen times. The woman spoke the dialect of the valley. She asked for prayer, for penance, for a spring of water, for a chapel, and for a procession. On 25 March, the feast of the Annunciation, she gave a name the child had never been taught: “I am the Immaculate Conception.” The bishop of Tarbes judged the apparitions worthy of belief in 1862. The spring still runs. The sick still come. Bernadette died at thirty-five, still ill, in a convent at Nevers.