Saint Bernadette

One cold February day in 1858 a poor 13-year-old peasant girl from Lourdes, France, called Bernadette was collecting twigs for firewood together with her sister, Marie and friend, Jeanne Abadie when she saw a vision of a lady near a small cave on the bank of a river. This lady looked like, according to Bernadette, a statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus. To make sure the vision was not a manifestation of the devil, Bernadette threw holy water at her. The lady inclined her head gracefully until the bottle was empty. Despite the temptation to run away the young peasant girl fell to her knees transfixed. Despite no one else seeing the vision, soon crowds gathered at the place of her “acquero” as Bernadette referred to it. The peasant girl started seeing more visions. During the ninth vision the gathered crowd witnessed Bernadette dig into the earth and uncover a trickle of water that proved to be a spring. An old stone mason with a blind eye bathed it in the spring’s water and his eyesight was restored. A large crowd of people gathered at Lourdes on the day of Bernadette’s eighteenth vision but still she was the only one to see the lady. This time she asked the young woman who she is; the answer in Provencal was “Que soy era Immaculada Councepciou”, (“I am the Immaculate Conception”.) The young peasant girl did not understand this but reported it to her parish priest. Despite the church authorities scepticism regarding Bernadette’s claims of a miracle sick people from all over France began making their way to Lourdes.
The sisters of Nevers had a house at Lourdes where they cared for the sick and instructed children. They received Bernadette, who disliked the attention she was attracting and wanted to get away from the trying publicity and the over enthusiastic attentions of insensitive pilgrims. The sisters taught her to read and write and kept her busy with light work. She then joined a convent, moving into their mother house at Nevers at the age of 22. Bernadette spent the rest of her brief life there, and in her later years contracted tuberculosis of the bone in the right knee. On 16 April 1879 the terminally ill Bernadette was heard to mumble “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for me, poor sinner, poor sinner.” A few seconds later Bernadette died. She had spent the last 12 years of her life working as an assistant in the infirmary and later as a sacristan, creating beautiful embroidery for altar cloths and vestments. Bernadette had followed the development of Lourdes as a pilgrimage shrine while she still lived at Lourdes, but was not present for the consecration of the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception there in 1876.