Saint Bernadette Soubirous

Saint Bernadette Soubirous was a poor girl of Lourdes to whom the Immaculate Virgin Mary appeared eighteen times in 1858. She later became a religious sister at Nevers and there, as Sister Marie-Bernard, lived the rest of her life in hiddenness and illness. The Church commemorates her on April 16, the day of her death.

She was born on January 7, 1844, in Lourdes, at the foot of the Pyrenees, the eldest child of the miller François Soubirous and Louise Castérot. The family lost the mill and fell into destitution, until they were living in a single dark room of the former jail, known as the cachot. From childhood Bernadette was in poor health and suffered from asthma. Instead of going to school she helped at home, and for a time she tended sheep in nearby Bartrès. At fourteen she could neither read nor write and had not yet made her First Communion.

On February 11, 1858, she went with her sister and a friend to gather firewood by the river Gave, near the grotto of Massabielle. She heard a sound like wind and saw in the grotto a Lady in white with a rosary in her hand. She made the sign of the cross and prayed the rosary with her. The apparitions continued until July 16. The Lady asked her to come for fifteen days, called for penance and prayer for sinners, told her to drink from a spring that then broke out in the grotto, and to tell the priests that a chapel should be built there and that people should come in procession.

On the Solemnity of the Annunciation, March 25, the Lady revealed her name: “I am the Immaculate Conception.” Bernadette did not understand these words and repeated them to the parish priest. Pope Pius IX had proclaimed the dogma of the Immaculate Conception four years earlier. The girl was questioned many times by civil and Church authorities, and each time she told the same story. She received her First Communion on June 3, 1858. In 1862 the bishop of Tarbes, after examining the matter, recognized the apparitions as authentic.

The parish priest, wishing to shield her from the curiosity of the crowds, placed her in the hospice that the Sisters of Charity of Nevers ran in Lourdes. There she learned to read and write and helped with the sick. In July 1866 she left for the motherhouse of the congregation in Nevers. The next day she told the sisters about the apparitions, and afterward she spoke of them only when she was told to. She made her religious profession on October 30, 1867, and her perpetual vows on September 22, 1878.

In the convent she worked in the infirmary and in the sacristy, though more and more often she herself lay ill: she suffered from asthma, tuberculosis, and a tumor of the knee. She died in Nevers on April 16, 1879, at the age of 35. Her body, found intact at the examinations of 1909, 1919, and 1925, rests in a glass reliquary in the convent chapel.

Pope Pius XI beatified her on June 14, 1925, and on December 8, 1933, the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, declared her a saint and directed that she be commemorated on April 16. In France her memorial falls on February 18.