Marlene F. Watkins is the founder of Our Lady of Lourdes Hospitality North American Volunteers, the first Lourdes Hospitality outside Europe and the first in the Americas. Marlene is the author of the recent bestselling and award winning book, Everyday Miracles of Lourdes Twenty Extraordinary Experiences Along the Way to the Grotto.

In almost twenty-five years as a volunteer, Marlene has led more than two hundred pilgrimages to Lourdes for more than seven thousand pilgrims, including the seriously ill and the profoundly disabled, with medical, adult, university, and youth volunteers. Marlene has also guided Lourdes Virtual Pilgrimage Experiences® across North America and in Europe, Asia, South America, and Africa.

Marlene hosts the popular weekly series My Lourdes Faith Journey®  on EWTN and has appeared on CBS, EWTN, PBS, and the BBC. In 2015, Marlene was named an Our Sunday Visitor “Catholic of the Year” and is a speaker at conferences, events, on radio shows and podcasts.

Marlene is a wife, mother, grandmother, Secular Franciscan, and member of the Hospitalité Notre-Dame de Lourdes. She and husband, Bill, live in Syracuse, New York, or in the LourdesMobile RV, traveling America the Beautiful to share the Gospel Message of Lourdes.

All proceeds from Everyday Miracles of Lourdes go directly to the mission of Our Lady of Lourdes Hospitality North American Volunteers, a Public Association of the Christian Faithful and 501(c)3 non-profit charity: www.lourdesvolunteers.org.

We are the first Lourdes Hospitality of the Americas and the first Hospitality outside Europe. We bring the seriously ill and disabled to Lourdes, France and serve the Sanctuary as volunteers. We evangelize through the Gospel Message of Lourdes sharing the grace of pilgrimage through Virtual Pilgrimage experiences to those unlikely or unable to make the physical journey to Europe.  We are volunteers, laity, clergy and religious, who lovingly serve the Immaculate Conception and her pilgrims both in the Sanctuary at France and back at home through living and sharing the Gospel Message of Lourdes. We are members of a Catholic Association united in prayer, evangelization and service within a charism of family centered in love reaching the sick and suffering, the poor and unloved.