The Lourdes experience
For one week in May, nursing students assist at one of the holiest sites in Catholicism, learning how to provide spiritual care for their future patients—a mission tied to Loyola’s Jesuit focus on care for the whole person.
By Ashley Rowland
Photos by Lukas Keapproth
Colleen Grogan, BSN ’24, had just finished praying with visitors inside the gray stone baths of Lourdes, a small French town in the foothills of the Pyrenees mountains, when a young Chinese couple came to her station.
At first they were calm, and it seemed like it would be a quick visit. Then the wife burst into tears. In halting English, the couple explained why they had come—to seek a miracle for their 2-year-old daughter, who was dying of cancer and was so sick she couldn’t make the trip.
Lourdes is one of the holiest sites in Catholicism. Each year, millions of people from around the world visit in search of physical, emotional, and spiritual healing. And for one week in May, students from the Marcella Niehoff School of Nursing assist in their pilgrimage.
Grogan, then a senior, performed the sacred ritual the Chinese couple desperately hoped would cure their child. She poured spring water from a pitcher into their hands three times as she instructed them to wash their hands and face, and then to drink from their cupped palms.
The sobbing mother then pulled out her daughter’s clothes. In the little girl’s absence, she asked Grogan to pour water on them.
Silently, Grogan washed a tiny pink T-shirt and white pants and then prayed with the parents, crying with them. Despite their pain, she was struck by the visceral sense of release that enveloped the couple as they knelt in prayer before a small image of the Virgin Mary and performed the generations-old bathing ritual.
Grogan would never see the couple again or know what happened to their daughter. But she said that brief encounter—and hundreds of others like it at Lourdes—transformed her approach to nursing.
“I had a lot of doubt about whether nursing was the right career path, and Lourdes reminded me about the value of human connection and why I chose nursing to begin with,” said Grogan, who first took part in the annual service immersion trip in 2023. She returned in 2024, a week after graduating, as a student leader. “I feel more confident in who I am and in my nursing abilities.”
Teaching spiritual care
The Lourdes experience is designed to teach nursing students how to go beyond physical needs and provide spiritual care for their future patients—a mission in keeping with the school’s Jesuit focus on cura personalis, or care for the whole person.
“Spiritual care is very difficult to teach someone,” said Associate Professor Ann Solari-Twadell, who leads the Loyola Nursing trip. “I could be lecturing in the classroom for six months and someone wouldn’t get it. But if you’re in those baths for several hours, you understand. You experience people who are in pain, not just physically, but spiritually and psychologically. You see them experience the ritual, the value of prayer, and the relief they go through.”
Students do not provide medical treatment to pilgrims, nor are they required to be Catholic or hold any specific religious beliefs. They don’t have to believe that miracles happen at Lourdes. But faculty organizers say the experience of working in the baths prepares nursing students to better connect with vulnerable patients and address the full range of emotions—despair, hope, joy, and fear—they'll encounter in a hospital setting.
“They realize that when you have a patient in a bed, there’s so much more going on than the physical diagnosis,” said Solari-Twadell. “By the time students leave, they feel comfortable praying out loud with other people and in recognizing the spiritual and religious needs of people who are either sick or are experiencing loss or grief.”
‘An act of faith'
Surrounded by green peaks and overlooked by a medieval fortress, Lourdes is a world away from the high-rises and bustle of Chicago. The city center is a tangle of narrow streets lined with cafes and souvenir shops selling rosary beads, statues of the Virgin Mary, and plastic jugs that pilgrims fill with spring water and take home. Faded red lanes mark pathways for wheelchairs and stretchers carrying the sick and disabled from their hotels to the nearby cathedral and baths.
The cathedral was built on top of a grotto where, in 1858, teenager Bernadette Soubirous reported 18 visions of Mary and unearthed a spring whose waters are believed to bring healing to the faithful. Since then, the Catholic Church has documented 70 inexplicable cures among those who have drunk or bathed in the water, though Church officials insist the water is not blessed and has no unusual properties.
“There’s nothing special about the water,” said Solari-Twadell. “It’s the ritual. It’s the act of faith, and the water is symbolic of the belief that there’s a greater power that can heal you.”
Today, the town of 15,000 is a major Catholic pilgrimage site, welcoming nearly five million visitors each year. They seek healing, community, or simply a way to celebrate and express their faith.
Seventeen baths inside a long, low building are at the heart of the religious experience for pilgrims, some of whom are non-Catholics. Loyola Nursing students spend several hours a day there during their week in Lourdes, assisting the steady stream of visitors with the simple gestures of the bathing ritual, which prior to the coronavirus pandemic was performed through immersion in a tub.
“Being here, you can just feel the holiness,” said junior Judy Carbajal, BSN ’26, one of seven students on the trip. “There’s a profound sense of peace, and I get so much joy from being able to go into the baths and help people. I love smiling at them, knowing we have this mutual belief in something that may help them physically or spiritually in their journey.”
Loyola's first trip
The trip got its start some 15 years ago when Fr. Michael Garanzini, S.J., former president of Loyola University Chicago, traveled to Lourdes. He remembers watching pilgrims gather for a photo in the giant piazza in front of the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes and being moved as volunteer nurses assisted the gravely ill.
“I was so impressed with this, and over the next few days one thing that became clear to me was that none of the nurses had any tools but themselves,” he said. “They weren’t using technology. It was all about the connection between the health provider and the sick.”
Inspired by the nurses, Loyola launched the School of Nursing’s first Lourdes trip in 2009. Nearly 130 students have since taken part in the program, which aims to put the Jesuit ideal of educating the whole person into practice.
“Educating the whole person isn’t just about the skills you learn,” said Garanzini, now president of the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities. “It’s really about whether you have a conversion of the heart and whether you’re going to be a person for others.”
Jorgia Connor, an associate professor who co-leads the trip, said everything students do in the baths is directly applicable to nursing. “The students aren’t starting IVs at Lourdes, but what they’re doing is welcoming people into a space that’s unknown to them,” she said. “These pilgrims are vulnerable, and our students are trying to minister to them and make them comfortable.”
During their week in the baths, nursing students learn to quickly assess the needs of those they serve and gain their trust, despite significant language and cultural differences. Faculty leaders challenge them to think about how to put those skills into action in their nursing practice.
“We talk about how to open up the conversation, how to let patients know it’s okay for them to talk about their faith during their most susceptible times,” Connor said.
In 2024, several faculty volunteered at the baths for a week following the student trip, the first time a Loyola Nursing faculty group has done so. Clinical Assistant Professor Patricia Stapleton said going to Lourdes deepened her faith. She described the trip as an eye-opening experience for student nurses, giving them a glimpse of how people cope with illness and chronic conditions in their daily lives and find joy amidst tragedy.
Students, she added, learn to respect patients’ differing religious beliefs and support them in practicing their faith—whether that means praying with them or simply listening.
“A lot of our undergraduate nurses are focused on how to get their patients better, and rightfully so,” she said. “They’re very task-oriented and focused on the clinical aspects of their work. This trip helps them understand, as they mature in their skills, how they can focus on the whole person and provide spiritual care in addition to great clinical care.”
The lessons of Lourdes
Students describe the trip as spiritually meaningful and even life-changing.
“People yearn for healing and for some connection with God, and being the channel of that has been a very beautiful experience,” said Ronald Chauca, BSN ’24, who planned to start his first job in the burn unit at Loyola University Medical Center.
Grogan, who plans to start her career in a Chicago intensive care unit, said Lourdes taught her the value of being present with her patients.
“I learned that just sitting there and being silent is sometimes the best thing you can do for someone, and that has translated so much into my nursing care,” she said. “It’s the small things you do, like holding someone’s hand, that make such a difference."
For one week in May, nursing students assist at one of the holiest sites in Catholicism, learning how to provide spiritual care for their future patients—a mission tied to Loyola’s Jesuit focus on care for the whole person.
By Ashley Rowland
Photos by Lukas Keapproth
Colleen Grogan, BSN ’24, had just finished praying with visitors inside the gray stone baths of Lourdes, a small French town in the foothills of the Pyrenees mountains, when a young Chinese couple came to her station.
At first they were calm, and it seemed like it would be a quick visit. Then the wife burst into tears. In halting English, the couple explained why they had come—to seek a miracle for their 2-year-old daughter, who was dying of cancer and was so sick she couldn’t make the trip.
Lourdes is one of the holiest sites in Catholicism. Each year, millions of people from around the world visit in search of physical, emotional, and spiritual healing. And for one week in May, students from the Marcella Niehoff School of Nursing assist in their pilgrimage.
Grogan, then a senior, performed the sacred ritual the Chinese couple desperately hoped would cure their child. She poured spring water from a pitcher into their hands three times as she instructed them to wash their hands and face, and then to drink from their cupped palms.
The sobbing mother then pulled out her daughter’s clothes. In the little girl’s absence, she asked Grogan to pour water on them.
Silently, Grogan washed a tiny pink T-shirt and white pants and then prayed with the parents, crying with them. Despite their pain, she was struck by the visceral sense of release that enveloped the couple as they knelt in prayer before a small image of the Virgin Mary and performed the generations-old bathing ritual.
Grogan would never see the couple again or know what happened to their daughter. But she said that brief encounter—and hundreds of others like it at Lourdes—transformed her approach to nursing.
“I had a lot of doubt about whether nursing was the right career path, and Lourdes reminded me about the value of human connection and why I chose nursing to begin with,” said Grogan, who first took part in the annual service immersion trip in 2023. She returned in 2024, a week after graduating, as a student leader. “I feel more confident in who I am and in my nursing abilities.”
Teaching spiritual care
The Lourdes experience is designed to teach nursing students how to go beyond physical needs and provide spiritual care for their future patients—a mission in keeping with the school’s Jesuit focus on cura personalis, or care for the whole person.
“Spiritual care is very difficult to teach someone,” said Associate Professor Ann Solari-Twadell, who leads the Loyola Nursing trip. “I could be lecturing in the classroom for six months and someone wouldn’t get it. But if you’re in those baths for several hours, you understand. You experience people who are in pain, not just physically, but spiritually and psychologically. You see them experience the ritual, the value of prayer, and the relief they go through.”
Students do not provide medical treatment to pilgrims, nor are they required to be Catholic or hold any specific religious beliefs. They don’t have to believe that miracles happen at Lourdes. But faculty organizers say the experience of working in the baths prepares nursing students to better connect with vulnerable patients and address the full range of emotions—despair, hope, joy, and fear—they'll encounter in a hospital setting.
“They realize that when you have a patient in a bed, there’s so much more going on than the physical diagnosis,” said Solari-Twadell. “By the time students leave, they feel comfortable praying out loud with other people and in recognizing the spiritual and religious needs of people who are either sick or are experiencing loss or grief.”
‘An act of faith'
Surrounded by green peaks and overlooked by a medieval fortress, Lourdes is a world away from the high-rises and bustle of Chicago. The city center is a tangle of narrow streets lined with cafes and souvenir shops selling rosary beads, statues of the Virgin Mary, and plastic jugs that pilgrims fill with spring water and take home. Faded red lanes mark pathways for wheelchairs and stretchers carrying the sick and disabled from their hotels to the nearby cathedral and baths.
The cathedral was built on top of a grotto where, in 1858, teenager Bernadette Soubirous reported 18 visions of Mary and unearthed a spring whose waters are believed to bring healing to the faithful. Since then, the Catholic Church has documented 70 inexplicable cures among those who have drunk or bathed in the water, though Church officials insist the water is not blessed and has no unusual properties.
“There’s nothing special about the water,” said Solari-Twadell. “It’s the ritual. It’s the act of faith, and the water is symbolic of the belief that there’s a greater power that can heal you.”
Today, the town of 15,000 is a major Catholic pilgrimage site, welcoming nearly five million visitors each year. They seek healing, community, or simply a way to celebrate and express their faith.
Seventeen baths inside a long, low building are at the heart of the religious experience for pilgrims, some of whom are non-Catholics. Loyola Nursing students spend several hours a day there during their week in Lourdes, assisting the steady stream of visitors with the simple gestures of the bathing ritual, which prior to the coronavirus pandemic was performed through immersion in a tub.
“Being here, you can just feel the holiness,” said junior Judy Carbajal, BSN ’26, one of seven students on the trip. “There’s a profound sense of peace, and I get so much joy from being able to go into the baths and help people. I love smiling at them, knowing we have this mutual belief in something that may help them physically or spiritually in their journey.”
Loyola's first trip
The trip got its start some 15 years ago when Fr. Michael Garanzini, S.J., former president of Loyola University Chicago, traveled to Lourdes. He remembers watching pilgrims gather for a photo in the giant piazza in front of the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes and being moved as volunteer nurses assisted the gravely ill.
“I was so impressed with this, and over the next few days one thing that became clear to me was that none of the nurses had any tools but themselves,” he said. “They weren’t using technology. It was all about the connection between the health provider and the sick.”
Inspired by the nurses, Loyola launched the School of Nursing’s first Lourdes trip in 2009. Nearly 130 students have since taken part in the program, which aims to put the Jesuit ideal of educating the whole person into practice.
“Educating the whole person isn’t just about the skills you learn,” said Garanzini, now president of the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities. “It’s really about whether you have a conversion of the heart and whether you’re going to be a person for others.”
Jorgia Connor, an associate professor who co-leads the trip, said everything students do in the baths is directly applicable to nursing. “The students aren’t starting IVs at Lourdes, but what they’re doing is welcoming people into a space that’s unknown to them,” she said. “These pilgrims are vulnerable, and our students are trying to minister to them and make them comfortable.”
During their week in the baths, nursing students learn to quickly assess the needs of those they serve and gain their trust, despite significant language and cultural differences. Faculty leaders challenge them to think about how to put those skills into action in their nursing practice.
“We talk about how to open up the conversation, how to let patients know it’s okay for them to talk about their faith during their most susceptible times,” Connor said.
In 2024, several faculty volunteered at the baths for a week following the student trip, the first time a Loyola Nursing faculty group has done so. Clinical Assistant Professor Patricia Stapleton said going to Lourdes deepened her faith. She described the trip as an eye-opening experience for student nurses, giving them a glimpse of how people cope with illness and chronic conditions in their daily lives and find joy amidst tragedy.
Students, she added, learn to respect patients’ differing religious beliefs and support them in practicing their faith—whether that means praying with them or simply listening.
“A lot of our undergraduate nurses are focused on how to get their patients better, and rightfully so,” she said. “They’re very task-oriented and focused on the clinical aspects of their work. This trip helps them understand, as they mature in their skills, how they can focus on the whole person and provide spiritual care in addition to great clinical care.”
The lessons of Lourdes
Students describe the trip as spiritually meaningful and even life-changing.
“People yearn for healing and for some connection with God, and being the channel of that has been a very beautiful experience,” said Ronald Chauca, BSN ’24, who planned to start his first job in the burn unit at Loyola University Medical Center.
Grogan, who plans to start her career in a Chicago intensive care unit, said Lourdes taught her the value of being present with her patients.
“I learned that just sitting there and being silent is sometimes the best thing you can do for someone, and that has translated so much into my nursing care,” she said. “It’s the small things you do, like holding someone’s hand, that make such a difference."