Saint Bernadette Soubirous

St. Bernadette was the eldest of the six children of François Soubirous and Louise Casterot. A very severe asthma took hold of her in her first years and never left her. Her parents bought her bread in place of the family's maize paste, and her brothers and sisters took it.

In 1857 AD a relation let the family live rent-free in the disused town gaol. The imperial procurator, M. Dutour, judged the room unfit for any human being to live in.

On Thursday, February 11, 1858 AD there was no more wood in the house. St. Bernadette went down to the Gave with her sister and their neighbour Jeanne Abadie. She stayed behind at the mill stream, afraid the cold water would bring on an attack.

A single bush at the rock moved as though in a high wind. Her arm stayed paralysed until the Lady had made the sign of the cross. That evening her mother called it an illusion and forbade her to return.

On February 21, 1858 AD the police commissioner Jacomet took her from vespers to his office. He read his notes back with errors deliberately introduced, and she corrected every one. The imperial procurator pressed her the same day, and she would not promise to stay away.

On February 25, 1858 AD she scratched the earth at the grotto and drank the muddy water. A cry went round the three hundred onlookers that the child had gone mad. By the next morning the spring was flowing that flows there still.

The parish priest demanded that the wild rose tree flower suddenly before the assembled crowd. The fortnight closed on March 4, 1858 AD with no sign given and no flower.

On March 25, 1858 AD she asked the Lady's name three times. The answer came in the Lourdes dialect, and she ran back repeating words she did not understand. Pope Pius IX had defined the Immaculate Conception as a dogma four years earlier.

The grotto was closed by order, so on July 16, 1858 AD she knelt across the river. It was the eighteenth appearance, and she never saw the Lady again. Before the bishop's commission that November she raised her hand and swore to her account.

For three or four years she had to begin the story again ten or twenty times a day. She and her parents refused every gift of money, and they often went hungry. She sat for the first photographs of her in 1861 AD.

On January 18, 1862 AD the Bishop of Tarbes published his charge on the grotto. Bishop Laurence judged that the Immaculate Mary, Mother of God, really appeared to St. Bernadette. He wrote that her story never varied and that she never added to it or took from it.

In 1864 AD she asked to live and die a Sister of Charity of Nevers. On the eve of her departure the sisters had to take her by the arm and lead her from the grotto. She left Lourdes on July 4, 1866 AD and never saw the town again.

She crossed the threshold of the mother house of Saint-Gildard on the evening of July 7, 1866 AD. The next day, before three hundred sisters, she told the story of the apparitions for the last time. In the novitiate she received the name Sister Marie-Bernard.

No work had been prepared for her, and the bishop declared that her work would be prayer. In thirteen years there she was assistant-nurse, then infirmarian, then sacristan. From 1875 AD asthma, tumours, rheumatism and disease of the bone closed in together.

On December 12, 1878 AD she made her final deposition on the apparitions from the infirmary. She repeated the words in the language of the Pyrenees and confirmed everything she had said as a child. She died at three in the afternoon on Wednesday, April 16, 1879 AD, aged thirty-five.

Three inspections of her body, in 1909 AD, 1919 AD and 1925 AD, found it intact. She was declared blessed in 1925 AD and canonised on December 8, 1933 AD. The shrine at Lourdes states that the Church raised her not for being chosen but for how she answered.