[Reposted and revised.]

TODAY is the anniversary of the day in 1858 that a 14-year-old peasant girl, Bernadette Soubirous, had the first of numerous visions in a grotto in Lourdes, France in the Pyrenees mountains. A beautiful young woman appeared to her. “Her face was oval in shape, and ‘of an incomparable grace,’ her yes were blue, her voice ‘Oh, so sweet!'”

Bernadette’s recollection are described in the book by Abbe Francois Trochu, Saint Bernadette Soubirous, first published in France in 1954:

“I had hardly begun to take off my stocking when I heard the sound of wind, as in a storm. I turned towards the meadow, and I saw that the trees were not moving at all. I had half-noticed, but without paying any particular heed, that the branches and brambles were waving beside the grotto.

I went on taking my stockings off, and was putting one foot into the water, when I heard the same sound in front of me. I looked up and saw a cluster of branches and brambles underneath the topmost opening in the grotto tossing and swaying to and fro, though nothing else stirred all around.

Behind these branches and within the opening, I saw immediately afterwards a girl in white, no bigger than myself, who greeted me with a slight bow of the head; at the same time, she stretched out her arms slightly away from her body, opening her hands, as in pictures of Our Lady; over her right arm hung a rosary.

I was afraid. I stepped back. I wanted to call the two little girls; I hadn’t the courage to do so. I rubbed my eyes again and again: I thought I must be mistaken.

Raising my eyes again, I saw the girl smiling at me most graciously and seeming to invite me to come nearer. But I was still afraid. It was not however a fear such as I have had at other times, for I would have stayed there for ever looking at her: whereas, when you are afraid, you run away quickly.

The lady or “girl” would return and communicate with Bernadette 16 times in the ensuing months. She is now known as Our Lady of Lourdes. Her timing was apt. Convulsed by the revolutions of 1848, the 19th-century was undergoing great changes.

Bernadette faced intense opposition from her parents, her teachers, her neighbors, the clergy and the local police, who threatened her with arrest. Her parents initially forbade her to return to the grotto. Many were converted to the view that she was telling the truth when they saw her experience one of her apparitions, so transfixed and transformed was this small, humble child. Twenty thousand people came to watch during the 14th apparition. But no one else saw what she saw or experienced the same incomparable ecstasy.

Our Lady instructed Bernadette to engage in humiliating acts of penance, scraping in the mud, drinking it and eating a bitter plant nearby. A spring arose on the spot and remains there today. It was because of these apparitions and Our Lady’s messages that the great doctrine of Mary’s Immaculate Conception was formally defined.

On the morning after her 12th apparition, a Paris newspaper reported:

“That little actress, the miller’s daughter at Lourdes, collected round her again on the morning of the 1st of March, beneath the Massabieille rock, nearly two thousand five hundred boobies. It is impossible to describe the idiocy and moral degeneration of these persons. The visionary treats them like a troop of monkeys and makes them commit absurdities of every kind. This morning, the pythoness was not inclined to play the seer, and to make a little variety in the exercises, she thought the best thing was to play the priestess. Assuming a grand air of authority, she ordered the fools to present their Rosaries and then blessed them all.”

Bernadette later became a religious celebrity, which was equally hard for her to bear. She retreated to a life of prayer, study and hard labor in a local hospice and then a convent. From Abbe Trochu’s book:

The day after Bernadette’s arrival at the convent, the superiors convened all the sisters — in an assembly such as the one pictured here — to hear the story of the apparitions from Bernadette herself. After this, Bernadette was never again allowed to speak to the other sisters about the apparitions. She humbly described herself as a broom which the Blessed Mother had used for a time, but then had quite rightly laid aside.

Her life there was not easy:

Bernadette’s main tasks in the convent were prayer and suffering; she had suffered from poor health …. all her life. To a nun who reproached her with being a lazybones who was always laid up in the infirmary, Bernadette replied, ‘Why, I’m doing my job! My job is to be ill.’

She died after a painful bone illness at the age of 35. Our Lady had promised her she would experience happiness — but not in this life. Many thousands of people have been healed, their stories in many cases confirmed by physicians, after visiting and bathing in the waters of the famous spring. Bernadette was canonized by Pope Pius XI in 1933. Her body remains incorrupt and on public view.

Read more about her life and the apparitions here.

On the 100th anniversary, Pope Pius XII wrote in his encyclical Le Pelerinage de Lourdes that the Blessed Virgin made St. Bernadette “her confidante, her collaboratrix, the instrument of her maternal tenderness and of the merciful power of her Son, to restore the world in Christ through a new and incomparable outpouring of the Redemption.”

No human institution has ever conferred more influence or more power on a woman than Our Lady of Lourdes conferred upon the sickly, unsophisticated and self-deprecating Bernadette.

Today is the Feast of Our Lady of Lourdes. From the novena to Our Lady of Lourdes:

O Brilliant star of purity, O Mary Immaculate, Our Lady of Lourdes, glorious in thine Assumption, triumphant in thy Coronation, show unto us thy mercy, O Virgin Mary, O Queen of Heaven and Our Mother, and be our comfort, our hope, our strength, and our consolation. Amen.

Our Lady of Lourdes, pray for us.
Saint Bernadette, pray for us.

A Lourdes prayer by Abbe Perreyve:

O Most Holy Virgin, do not in the midst of your greatness forget our earthly sorrows. Cast down your tender look upon those who suffer, who struggle against difficulties, and who cease not wetting their lips in the bitter draughts of this life. Have pity I beseech you on those, who although united in love, have been cruelly parted, and take pity on the lonely-hearted. Grant us your help in our unbelief, and have compassion on those most dear to us. Be compassionate upon those who mourn, who pray, who tremble, and grant all Hope and Peace. –

— Comments —

Gail L. Aggen writes:

I don’t know why I continue to be amazed at how holy people or those striving to do something good can be so misunderstood, opposed and vilified in their lifetimes. Reading what they wrote about Bernadette in the newspaper article illustrates that the haughty, mocking spirit so alive today has been around forever.

Often these folks die in obscurity, only to have their efforts and very essence finally realized and appreciated much later by the world. Even when they achieve notoriety in their lifetimes, garnering large followings (as it was for Bernadette and the Fatima children, for example), the lives of these special ones are typically not made easier, but in fact become more painful for all the attention.

May we all be granted the grace of heroic virtue, counting it all joy when we endure our little moments of persecution for righteousness sake, and like our little Bernadette, just keep our eyes on the prize.

Feb. 12, 2021

Laura writes:

Some interesting reflections on this post at Steeple Tea.

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