Anecdotes about the Virgin Mary

"Bernadette's rosary and the Lady dressed in white"

Lourdes (France) (1858)

On February 11, 1858, Bernadette Soubirous, a fourteen-year-old girl, went with her sister and a friend to gather firewood outside Lourdes. As she took off her shoes to cross the stream near the grotto of Massabielle, she heard "a sound like a gust of wind" and saw a Lady dressed in white, with a blue ribbon and "a yellow rose on each foot." The apparition prayed the rosary with her and disappeared when she finished.

In subsequent apparitions, Bernadette always returned with her rosary in her hand, and Our Lady prayed it beside her. The shrine emphasizes that the rosary was, from the very first moment, the language of their encounter: a simple, repeated, and humble prayer, perfectly suited to that poor and sick girl.

This was the Lady's response, in Gascon dialect, on March 25, 1858, the Feast of the Annunciation, when Bernadette repeatedly asked her name. In another apparition, invited to dig in the ground, drink, and wash, the girl caused the spring to gush forth that would become the most famous symbol of Lourdes.

The early history of the sanctuary also preserves two endearing episodes: that of Catherine Latapie, who washed her dislocated arm in that water on the very night of the first apparition and regained mobility; and that of the candle that Bernadette held during an ecstasy, whose flame passed by her hand without burning it, a fact observed by Dr. Douzous.