St. Bernadette, nearly bedridden, makes her final vows at Nevers

NEVERS, France, September 22, 1878 AD — Saint Bernadette Soubirous made her final vows today at Saint-Gildard, the mother house of the Sisters of Charity of Nevers, and bound herself to the congregation for life. She has lived here for twelve years as Sister Marie-Bernard, far from Lourdes, where the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to her twenty years ago. It was the third time she had made vows in this house, and the last: these are the vows a sister does not take back. She is thirty-four, and for most of this year she has been almost confined to bed.

St. Bernadette was fourteen in 1858 AD when the Blessed Virgin appeared to her eighteen times at the grotto of Massabielle, between February 11 and July 16. At twenty, after a year of prayer, she asked the superior of the Nevers sisters’ hospice at Lourdes to write to the Bishop of Nevers that she wished “to live and die a sister of your Order”. She left Lourdes on July 4, 1866 AD, and reached Saint-Gildard on the evening of July 7. The next day, still in the peasant dress of the Pyrenees, she told the story of the apparitions to three hundred sisters. It was the last time she told it. St. Bernadette said of her coming to Nevers: “I came here to hide myself.”

Within months she was dying. One evening, as she left the refectory, she vomited so much blood that the house doctor said at once there was no hope. Bishop Forcade of Nevers, who governed the congregation, crossed the town on foot late at night to give her the last sacraments. On the stairs the superior told the bishop how sorry she was that St. Bernadette would die without having made her vows. The bishop turned back and had the vows pronounced in her name. St. Bernadette could not speak, and she nodded her head. She sank into what looked like her last agony, woke smiling, and within two or three days was recovering. Because she had lived, she had to go back into the novitiate and finish her training.

On October 30, 1867 AD, she made her first commitment to religious life with forty-four other novices, before Bishop Forcade in the convent church. No post in the congregation had been prepared for her, and the bishop told her that hers would be “the work of prayer”. A few days later she was moved from the kitchen to nurse in the convent’s hospital. She had always wanted the work and had never told anyone. She was not strong enough for it. The house doctor told the superior that St. Bernadette “would be more in her place in the sick bed itself than in doing the work of a nurse”, and the superior put her in charge of the community chapel instead. As sacristan she decorated the altars with real taste and became skilled at embroidery.

From 1875 AD her health grew steadily worse. She had asthma, tumours, rheumatism and a bone disease, and she spat blood. A tumour grew in her knee, and she had tuberculosis in her lungs. Sometimes she collapsed on the sanctuary steps while she prayed in the chapel. St. Bernadette was ashamed of these fainting fits, and told the sisters who nursed her: “It’s very silly of me, dear sisters, to give way so easily and I am sure you must be shocked at me.”

One of her superiors at Nevers, Mother Marie-Thérèse Vauzou, called her “a closed character, very touchy”. St. Bernadette was distressed by the faults she had and fought them hard. In these later years she was also afraid for her soul, and that fear hurt her more than the illness did. She accused herself of faults she had not committed and thought she was a great sinner. When she spoke of the apparitions, it was only to say she had not been worthy of them.

The Annales de Notre Dame de Lourdes (Annals of Our Lady of Lourdes) say that with her final vows she “buried herself for ever in the heart of her crucified Spouse”.

Her last illness took hold soon after. On December 11, in the week after the feast of the Immaculate Conception, she went back to the infirmary. She took the bed she usually had there and never left it again. A large tumour had stiffened her right knee so that it would not bend, and the bone disease was spreading. Lying in bed, she soon had open sores.

On December 12 and 13, representatives of the Bishops of Tarbes and of Nevers questioned her about the apparitions one last time, with the superior-general of the congregation and the superior-general’s council present. St. Bernadette was more joyful than anyone was used to seeing her. She answered a long string of questions willingly and confirmed everything she had said as a child. Then she repeated once more, in the language of the Pyrenees, the words Our Lady had spoken to her at the grotto.