Santa Bernadette Soubirous

Lourdes lens (1858) · "I am the Immaculate Conception"

A poor, sick girl from Lourdes, to whom a "beautiful Lady" appeared eighteen times in the Grotto of Massabielle, taught her to pray the rosary and revealed to her: "I am the Immaculate Conception."

Who was that?

Marie-Bernarde Soubirous, named Bernadette, was born on January 7, 1844 in Lourdes, daughter of ruined mills. The family lived in misery, in an old prison turned into a home, the "cachot." Bernadette, with health fragile by asthma, barely knew how to read and prepared with difficulty for the First Communion; she was a simple peasant girl who cared for sheep and collected wood. After the apparitions he entered the Sisters of Charity of Nevers, where he lived hidden and delivered, saying, "My job is to be sick." He died in Nevers on April 16, 1879; he was canonized by Pius XI in 1933. His body remains incorruted.

The apparitions

Between February 11 and July 16, 1858, Bernadette received eighteen apparitions of a "beautiful lady" dressed in white, with a blue girdle and a golden rose on each foot, in the Grotto of Massabielle, by the Gave River. In the first, while he was collecting wood, he saw a light and the Lady, who was revealed and prayed the rosary with her - the Virgin passed the beads and moved her lips in the Glory, but only Bernadette prayed aloud.

The words of the Virgin

The message is summarized in "prayer and penance." The Lady asked Bernadette to return to the grotto for fifteen days, to pray "for the conversion of sinners" and to do penance by kissing the ground in repair; she asked the priests to say "to build a chapel here" and to have the people come in procession, and she ordered him to drink and wash in the fountain that then sprung up at the Berhadette scrubbing in the mud. The Lady treated her with a respect that moved the child: "I was talking about you." On March 25, the feast of the Annunciation, when she asked her third name, the Lady gathered her hands and responded in dialect: "That was immaculate councepciou" - "I am the Immaculate Conception." Bernadette, who did not understand that word, repeated it all the way not to forget it; it was one of the trials that weighed most on the recognition of the apparitions, for dogma had been proclaimed only four years earlier.

Anecdotes and afterlife

Interrogated over and over again by civil and religious authorities who tried to bring it into contradictions, Bernadette always maintained the same simplicity: "I was not asked to make it believe, but to say it." He rejected all money and notoriety. In Nevers' convent he lived in anonymity, sometimes treated hard to preserve from vanity, and suffered long diseases with patience. He died at 35, asking for forgiveness and praying: "Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for me, poor sinner."

Fruit

The Grotto of Massabielle is today one of the greatest shrines in the world, the goal of millions of pilgrims and sick people who come to its source. Lourdes made the Immaculate Conception and the rosary the heart of a universal devotion of prayer, conversion and comfort of those who suffer.