St. Bernadette's first vows were a nod from her sickbed

NEVERS, France, September 22, 1878 AD — Saint Bernadette Soubirous made her final vows today at Saint-Gildard. It is the main convent of the Sisters of Charity of Nevers, in France. The vows bind her to the sisters for life, and a sister does not take them back. St. Bernadette is thirty-four, and for most of this year she has been almost confined to bed. It was the third time she had made vows in this house. The first time, she couldn’t say a word.

In 1858 AD, when St. Bernadette was fourteen, the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to her at Lourdes. It happened eighteen times, at the grotto of Massabielle. At twenty, after a year of prayer, she asked the superior of the Nevers sisters’ hospice at Lourdes to write a letter for her. It told the Bishop of Nevers that she wished “to live and die a sister of your Order”.

She reached Saint-Gildard on the evening of July 7, 1866 AD. The next day she was still wearing the peasant dress of the Pyrenees. That day she told three hundred sisters the story of how Our Lady had appeared to her. It was the last time she told it. St. Bernadette said of her coming to Nevers: “I came here to hide myself.”

A nod in the night

Within months she was dying. One evening, as she left the dining room, she vomited a great deal of blood. The house doctor said at once there was no hope. Bishop Forcade of Nevers was in charge of the sisters. He crossed the town on foot late at night to give her the last sacraments.

Bishop Forcade gave them to her and was leaving. On the stairs, the superior told him how sorry she was. St. Bernadette would die without having made her vows. Bishop Forcade turned back, and he had the words of the vows spoken for her. St. Bernadette couldn’t speak, so she nodded her head.

Then she grew so weak that she seemed to be dying. She woke up smiling, and within two or three days she was getting better. Now that she was going to live, she had to go back to the novitiate and finish her training.

On October 30, 1867 AD, she made her vows again in the convent church, before Bishop Forcade. Forty-four other novices made theirs with her. No job among the sisters had been prepared for her. Bishop Forcade told her that hers would be “the work of prayer”.

A wish she never told

St. Bernadette had been working in the kitchen. A few days after these vows, she was moved to nursing in the convent’s hospital. She had always wanted that work, and she had never told anyone.

But she wasn’t 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”. So the superior put her in charge of the chapel instead. St. Bernadette decorated its altars with real taste, and she became skilled at embroidery.

From 1875 AD she grew steadily worse. She had asthma and tuberculosis in her lungs, and a tumour grew in her knee. Sometimes, while she prayed in the chapel, she collapsed on the steps of the sanctuary. St. Bernadette was ashamed of these fainting fits, and she 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.”

Her last illness began soon after her final vows. On December 11, she went back to the convent’s hospital. She took the bed she usually had there, and she never left it again.

On December 12 and 13, people sent by the Bishops of Tarbes and of Nevers questioned her about Our Lady’s appearances one last time. St. Bernadette was more joyful than anyone was used to seeing her. She answered a long string of questions willingly. She said again everything she had said as a child. Then she repeated the words Our Lady had spoken to her at the grotto. She said them once more in the language of the Pyrenees.