Healing of Henri Boisselet

Instantaneous cure at the close of a novena to Bernadette on December 8, 1913 (Feast of the Immaculate Conception). Had received Last Sacraments before the cure.

Henri Boisselet was struck in November 1913 by tubercular peritonitis — an infection of the peritoneum, the membrane lining the abdominal cavity, caused by the tuberculosis bacterium. The condition was at the time nearly always fatal. No effective treatment existed; surgery offered little hope. His deterioration was severe enough that he received the Last Sacraments, the Church's final rites administered when death is imminent.

Those close to him began a novena — nine days of prayer — directed to Bernadette Soubirous, who had died in 1879 and whose cause for beatification was under active investigation. The novena was scheduled to conclude on December 8, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. The significance of the date was not incidental: it was on that same feast that the Lady of Lourdes had identified herself to Bernadette in 1858, declaring herself to be the Immaculate Conception — a phrase Bernadette had never heard and could not have composed herself.

On December 8, 1913, at the close of the novena, Henri Boisselet was instantaneously and completely cured. The peritonitis that had brought him to last rites was gone. Physicians examining him found no medical explanation for the recovery.

The case was submitted to the Congregation of Rites as part of the formal investigation into Bernadette's beatification. The Congregation examined ten proposed miracles in total and selected two for formal certification. Boisselet's cure was one; the other was the healing of Sister Marie-Mélanie Meyer from a near-fatal gastric ulcer following a pilgrimage to Bernadette's tomb. Both miracles were certified on May 2, 1925. On June 14, 1925, Pope Pius XI beatified Bernadette Soubirous in Rome.

The timing of Boisselet's cure — instantaneous, on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, through prayer alone — completed a connection that stretched from the grotto at Massabielle in 1858 to a sickroom more than five decades later.