Saint Bernadette de Soubirous
His feast is celebrated on April 16
On January 7, 1844 at two in the afternoon, in Lourdes, a small town in southern France, in the Hautes-Pyrénées department, a girl was born whose parents, Luisa Castérot and Francisco Soubirous, named her Maria Bernarda ; Bernadette, as everyone would call her after her and as she would later become known to the whole world.
Bernadette, the first-born, was born in a tiny and humble house, the Boly mill, on the banks of the Lapaca stream. She soon got out of there. She was only a few months old when her mother, who was expecting another child, was severely burned in a home fire. Bernadette is then taken to Bartrés, about 4 kilometers from Lourdes, to the house of María Lagues who had just lost her little son Juan de Ella, who was only eighteen days old. Bernadette, accompanied by her godmother Bernarda de Ella, arrives at the Burg house where she stays for a year. On April 1, 1846 she returns to Boly. But the situation of the Soubirous family is not good; the increasing economic difficulties force Francisco Soubirous to look for another house that is poorer and more modest than the previous one. They temporarily move to the Laborde house.
But they are not easy years. During the autumn of 1855 Bernadette is hit by the cholera epidemic, which in a few months claimed thirty victims. The girl’s health, weak from the privations suffered in early childhood, receives a new blow. Throughout her brief existence, Bernadette will bear the marks of her various ailments, mainly asthma, imprinted on her fragile body. But it seems that illnesses, by weakening Bernadette’s body, strengthened her spirit at the same time. After a year, another transfer. This time, to a new mill 4 kilometers from Lourdes. Bernadette looks after her sister Ella Toinette and her little brothers Juan María and Justino. The pilgrimages, however, have not ended. Francisco Soubirous has a cousin, Andrés Sajous, owner of the old prison now out of use. And here, in the saddest part of the prison, in the so-called cachot (4.40 m. by 4m.), is where Bernadette will live for a few years of her life.
In September 1857, María Lagues, who had already welcomed her in Bartrés, called her again to help her with the housework, with the tasks in the fields and with the care of the flock of sheep. In Bartrès she is forced to interrupt the modest religious education that she had begun in Lourdes. She still doesn’t know how to read or write but she is determined to receive her First Communion. At night, after long hours of work, the girl repeats the formulas of the catechism by heart. Finally, in January 1858, Bernadette returned to Lourdes and to the cachot in Rue des Petits Fossés. It arrives in February of that year, it is a Thursday. The firewood has run out in the house and Bernadette offers to go and collect it, down there, towards the Gave stream, with her sister Toinette and Jeanne Abadie, whom they call Baloum. The three girls descend to the place called Masse-Vieille (today called Massabielle): it is a strong rock that covers a long grotto, about eight meters wide.
Exactly in this place the three girls see a bundle of firewood that the current of the Gave had dragged there, but to reach it it is necessary to cross the torrent, and Bernadette, afraid of entering the icy water, hesitates for a moment and while the others, Determined, they cross the stream, she delays to take off her stockings first. She later narrated Bernadette that at that moment she heard a strong noise of wind, but when she turned she saw that everything was calm and that the trees had not moved. She again heard the same rumor but then she saw a Lady inside the grotto. She described her dressed in white, with a white veil that covered her head, a light blue bow, two roses on each foot and a rosary of white beads. The Lady began to recite the rosary, soon followed by the girl. She suddenly, and after having smiled at him, she disappeared. This was the first vision of Bernadette Soubirous: only the first of a long series of visions, eighteen, which occurred from that February 11, 1858 to July 16.
During the apparitions of the Lady, Bernadette enters into ecstasy, prays, smiles and speaks with that apparition that she, and only she, can contemplate in all its beauty. To whom, a long time later, she will ask if the Lady was really so beautiful, Bernadette will answer: So beautiful that after having seen her once she wishes to die so that she could see her again. But Bernadette, alone in her ecstasy, will never be alone in the grotto.
The people, who have heard of the apparitions of the Lady dressed in white to little Bernadette, follow her when she goes down to the grotto to pray. There are the curious, the guards, the parish priest of Lourdes, but there are also, and they are the most numerous, those who believe in Bernadette’s visions. The number of people accompanying Bernadette increases rapidly: from a few dozen to several thousand in a short time.
On Tuesday, March 2, the Virgin asks Bernadette for two things: that processions be made to the grotto and that a chapel be built there in her honor. But in whose honor? asked the high prelates to whom Bernadette referred the colloquium. It is a question that will find an answer on March 25; the Lady is the Immaculate Conception. This is what Bernadette refers to the clergy, above all to Abbot Peyramale, the parish priest of Lourdes, but also to Abbot Pène, Abbot Serres, Abbot Pomian…
It is the summit, the highest point in its meaning, of the Massabielle apparitions. These will end on a Friday, July 16; but before that day, Bernadette will have realized her great dream: to receive First Communion on the day of the feast of the Blessed Sacrament. Despite the supernatural event that has shaken the simplicity of her life, Bernadette remains the same. Humble as ever, she has continued her housework and followed her studies. Also her health remains the same. In July 1860, invited by the nuns, she went to the Nevers Hospice. Bernadette leaves the house and stays as a nurse for two years between them (1861 and 1862). In August 1864, she asked to be admitted to the congregation of the Nevers sisters and so, on June 3, 1866, she left her small town forever and, above all, left her grotto. On October 30, 1867, in Nevers, Bernadette pronounced her temporary vows and, finally, with perpetual vows, she becomes Sister Maria Bernarda.
In the community she worked as a nurse and a sacristan, and later, for nine long years, she suffered from a very painful illness. When the most terrible attacks came to him, he exclaimed: “What I ask of Our Lord is not that he grant me health, but that he grant me courage and strength to patiently endure my illness. To fulfill what the Blessed Virgin recommended, I offer my sufferings as penance for the conversion of sinners”.
One of the means that God has for saintly people to reach a high degree of perfection is to allow misunderstanding to come to them, and many times from people who are in high positions and who by persecuting them think that with they are doing a good deed.
Bernadette’s superior during her first years as a nun was a woman who totally disliked her and judged almost everything she did negatively. Thus, for example, because of a strong and continuous pain that the young woman suffered in one knee, she had to limp a little. Well, the superior said that Bernadette limped so that people, seeing the nuns, could distinguish from afar which one was the one who had seen the Virgin. And so she in countless unpleasant details she made her suffer. And she never complained or was upset about any of this. She remembered very well the news that the Mother of God had given her: “I will not make you happy in this life, but I will in the next.”
She was a religious for thirteen years. The first 6 years she was working, but she was treated with a lot of indifference by her superiors. Later, the other 9 years she suffered night and day from two terrible diseases: asthma and tuberculosis. When winter came, with a cold of several degrees below zero, she continually drowned and her life was one of continuous suffering.
She wanted very much to return to Lourdes, but since the day she went to visit the Grotto for the last time to go as a nun, she never went back there. She repeated: “Oh who could go there, without being seen. When he has seen the Blessed Virgin once, he would be willing to make any sacrifice in order to see her again. She is so beautiful.”
Arriving at the Community, they gathered the nuns and asked her to tell them how the apparitions of the Virgin had been. She was then forbidden to speak of this again, and in her 13 years as a religious she was no longer allowed to deal with this subject. They are sacrifices that they prepare for the saints, most high placed in heaven.
When she was close to death, a bishop came to visit her and told her that he was on his way to Rome, to write a letter to the Holy Father asking him to send her a blessing, and that he would take it personally. Bernadette, with a trembling hand, writes: “Holy Father, what audacity, that I, a poor little sister, write to the Supreme Pontiff. But the Lord Bishop has ordered me to do so. I ask you for a special blessing for this poor sick woman”. On his return from the trip, the Lord Bishop brought him a very special blessing from the Pope and a silver crucifix that the Holy Father had sent him as a gift.
On April 16, 1879, she exclaimed excitedly: “I saw the Virgin. Yes, I saw her, I saw her. How beautiful she was!” And after a few moments of silence she exclaimed emotionally: “Pray, Lady, for this poor sinner,” and pressing the crucifix over her heart, she died. She was just 35 years old.
Bernadette’s funeral was attended by a huge crowd. And she began to obtain miracles from God in favor of those who asked for her help.
His body was placed in the small Gothic Chapel, located in the center of the Convent garden, which was dedicated to Saint Joseph. It was in this Chapel that, after 30 years, exactly on September 22, 1909, the body was recognized, in view of the diocesan beatification process. The body was found in perfect condition. His hard skin, but intact, retained its color. There was a second recognition of her on April 18, 1925, shortly before her Beatification on June 12, 1925. On December 8, 1933, the Holy Father Pius XI declared her a saint.
His body is preserved incorrupt in a glass reliquary, in the chapel of the mother house of the Sisters of Charity in Nevers (France).
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