Saint Bernadette Soubirous

On a cold Thursday in February 1858, Bernadette Soubirous went out to look for firewood. She was fourteen, the eldest child of a miller's family that had fallen into extreme poverty, and there was nothing left to burn at home. She was small and frail, troubled by asthma, and could not read, but she loved the Rosary. She had been born in Lourdes on 7 January 1844.

She set out with her sister Toinette and a friend toward the rock of Massabielle on the river Gave, where a small grotto sheltered the village pigs and where the river left driftwood. To reach it they had to cross a stream of water running from a mill. The other two girls took off their clogs and waded in. Bernadette, who wore stockings because of her delicate health, asked her friend to carry her, was refused, and was left alone at the water's edge. According to her account, it was there, on 11 February 1858, that a "young lady" first appeared to her.

Over the following months, until 16 July 1858, the Lady appeared to Bernadette many times. She asked that a chapel be built at the grotto. On 25 March she gave her name, saying that she was the Immaculate Conception. Pope Pius IX had defined that doctrine four years earlier, and it was not something a poor, unlettered girl could be expected to know. After a canonical investigation, Bernadette's reports were declared worthy of belief in 1862, and the bishop of Tarbes confirmed Lourdes as a Marian shrine. The grotto became one of the great pilgrimage sites of the Church, drawing around five million visitors each year.

Fame weighed on her. On 7 July 1866 Bernadette sought refuge at Saint-Gildard, the motherhouse of the Sisters of Charity of Nevers, and she joined the congregation as Sister Marie-Bernarde. Her years there were marked by humility and by a life largely kept out of sight. She died in Nevers on 16 April 1879, at thirty-five.

Her body, which the Church holds to be internally incorrupt, rests in a glass reliquary in the chapel at Saint-Gildard, where pilgrims still come. Pope Pius XI beatified her in 1925 and canonized her in 1933. She is remembered as a poor, ill, uneducated girl whose account the Church judged worthy of belief, and who afterward chose a hidden life over the attention of crowds.

Saint Bernadette Soubirous, pray for us.