The most striking thing about Lourdes water is what the sanctuary says about it, which is almost nothing. It has not been blessed. No rite has been performed over it. The sanctuary states plainly that the water has no property in itself, gives it away, and prohibits its sale, so the taps along the grotto wall run continuously and the containers are free. In a town whose economy is built on several million pilgrims a year, and where every shop sells candles, statues and rosaries, the one thing that cannot be sold is the water. That restraint is the Church's answer to a charge it has faced since 1858, that it is trading in the hope of desperate people.
What the water is, institutionally, is a point of contact. The spring emerged during the series of apparitions reported by Bernadette Soubirous, a miller's daughter of fourteen, at the grotto of Massabielle in 1858. She was told, she said, to drink and wash there. The bishop of Tarbes approved the apparitions in 1862 after an inquiry. Everything else, the basilicas, the processions, the baths, the hospitals and the enormous organised pilgrimages of the sick, was built around that spot afterwards. The water is what the site offers, and it is offered on terms designed to make it impossible to describe as a purchase.