Saint Bernadette Soubirous

Life and historical context

Marie-Bernarde Soubirous, known by the diminutive Bernadette, was born on 7 January 1844 in Lourdes, a small town in the Bigorre region of southwestern France in the foothills of the Pyrenees. She was the eldest of nine children of François Soubirous, a miller, and Louise Castérot. The family fell into severe poverty during Bernadette's childhood as her father's mill business failed; by 1856 the family was living in a single room of an abandoned prison cell called the Cachot in central Lourdes. Bernadette's early childhood was further marked by serious illness: she contracted cholera in 1855, which left her with the chronic asthma that would afflict her for the rest of her life.¹

She received almost no formal education in her early years. The family's poverty required her to work from a young age as a shepherdess and as a domestic servant. By the winter of 1857-1858, when she was fourteen, she had not yet made her First Communion, an unusual delay for a French Catholic child of her time, owing both to her chronic illness and to her difficulty in learning the catechism. Her religious formation was the simple home piety of her family: the Our Father, the Hail Mary, the Apostles' Creed, and the rosary, all of which she prayed in the local Occitan dialect.

The decisive event of her life began on 11 February 1858, when Bernadette, gathering firewood with her sister and a friend at the grotto of Massabielle near the river Gave just outside Lourdes, experienced what she later described as a vision of a small lady (in Occitan, aquero, that one) at the grotto. The visions continued at the same grotto, in the same form, on seventeen further occasions over the following five months, ending on 16 July 1858. The visionary spoke with Bernadette in the local Occitan dialect, asked for the construction of a chapel at the grotto, called for the conversion of sinners, and on 25 March 1858 (the feast of the Annunciation) identified herself with the Occitan phrase Que soy era Immaculada Councepciou ( I am the Immaculate Conception).²

The civil and ecclesiastical investigations of the apparitions were extensive. The local Imperial police interrogated Bernadette repeatedly, attempting to dismiss the apparitions as fraud or as the imaginings of a child with poor health. The diocesan inquiry, conducted under Bishop Bertrand Sévère Laurence of Tarbes from 1858 to 1862, included extensive medical and theological examination. On 18 January 1862, after four years of investigation, Bishop Laurence formally declared the apparitions worthy of belief by the Catholic faithful, the standard ecclesiastical formula for the recognition of a private revelation.

Bernadette's life after the apparitions was marked by extraordinary public attention from which she sought to escape. She entered the boarding school of the Sisters of Charity at Lourdes in 1861 and remained there until 1866, when she traveled to the motherhouse of the Sisters of Charity at Nevers in central France to enter the religious life. She received the religious name Sister Marie-Bernard. She remained at Nevers for the rest of her life, thirteen years, never returning to Lourdes. She suffered from increasingly severe asthma, tuberculosis of the bone, and a tubercular tumor that was lanced in 1879 without anesthesia. She died at Nevers on 16 April 1879, at the age of thirty-five.³

Theological and spiritual significance

The Catholic doctrinal framework for understanding the Lourdes apparitions is the doctrine of private revelation. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that "throughout the ages, there have been so-called 'private' revelations, some of which have been recognized by the authority of the Church. They do not belong, however, to the deposit of faith. It is not their role to improve or complete Christ's definitive Revelation, but to help live more fully by it in a certain period of history" (CCC 67). Lourdes is one of the most significant Catholic private revelations of the modern era, formally recognized by the diocesan and papal magisterium.

The apparitions' identification of the Blessed Virgin Mary as the Immaculate Conception in March 1858 has a particular theological weight. The dogma of the Immaculate Conception (the doctrine that Mary was preserved from the stain of original sin from the moment of her conception) had been formally defined by Pope Pius IX only four years earlier, on 8 December 1854, in the apostolic constitution Ineffabilis Deus. Bernadette, a fourteen-year-old illiterate peasant girl, had no theological framework in which to understand the title and could not even pronounce it correctly when she repeated it to the parish priest. The Catholic Church has read this as confirmation, in the order of private revelation, of the dogmatic definition of 1854.

The Lourdes spring water that emerged at the grotto on 25 February 1858 has become the principal physical sign of the Catholic devotion to Our Lady of Lourdes. The water is not held by the Catholic Church to be magical or sacramental; it is a sacramental in the technical sense (a Catholic devotional sign that disposes the soul to receive grace). The Lourdes Bureau of Medical Verification, established in 1882 and reorganized in 1947, has documented sixty-nine officially recognized miracles of healing at Lourdes through 2018, after rigorous medical and ecclesiastical investigation. Tens of millions of pilgrims have visited Lourdes since 1858, making it one of the principal Catholic pilgrimage destinations in the world.⁴

Bernadette herself was beatified by Pope Pius XI on 14 June 1925 and canonized by him on 8 December 1933 (the eightieth anniversary of the dogmatic definition of the Immaculate Conception). Her body, exhumed three times for canonization purposes (in 1909, 1919, and 1925), was found in remarkable preservation, with the body remaining substantively incorrupt despite the conditions of her burial. Her body, vested in the Sisters of Charity habit, is preserved in a glass-walled reliquary at the chapel of Saint-Gildard in Nevers.

Devotion and liturgical observance

The feast of Saint Bernadette is celebrated on 16 April in the universal Roman Calendar, the date of her death. In France, the feast is observed with greater solemnity. The feast of Our Lady of Lourdes, on 11 February (the date of the first apparition), is celebrated on the universal Roman Calendar with the rank of optional memorial and is also the World Day of the Sick, instituted by Pope Saint John Paul II in 1992.

The principal pilgrimage destinations associated with Saint Bernadette are the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes (the grotto of Massabielle, the basilica complex built over and around it, and the baths of the Lourdes spring) and the chapel of Saint-Gildard in Nevers (where her body is preserved in the convent where she lived as Sister Marie-Bernard). The town of Lourdes itself receives approximately six million pilgrims annually.

The traditional iconography of Saint Bernadette shows her either as the young peasant girl in white peasant cap and shawl kneeling at the grotto of Lourdes, or as the religious in the black habit and white wimple of the Sisters of Charity of Nevers, holding a rosary or kneeling in prayer. Her liturgical color on the feast is white.

Prayers and novenas associated with Saint Bernadette

The principal devotion to Saint Bernadette is the Novena to Saint Bernadette of Lourdes, prayed for healing from physical illness, for the gift of childlike trust in God, and for the grace to bear suffering with patience after the example of the saint. The novena is most commonly prayed in the nine days leading up to her feast on 16 April or before the feast of Our Lady of Lourdes on 11 February.

Catholics commonly pair Saint Bernadette devotions with the Holy Rosary, particularly the Joyful Mysteries and the Sorrowful Mysteries, and with the Rosary of Our Lady of Lourdes (the standard rosary prayed at the grotto). The traditional Lourdes invocation, prayed by pilgrims at the grotto, is "Our Lady of Lourdes, pray for us. Saint Bernadette, pray for us."

For the broader theological context, see the Communion of Saints, Mary, Mother of God, and the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. For the related modern Marian apparition, see the article on the Miraculous Medal and the apparitions to Saint Catherine Labouré (1830).

Sources

Footnotes

1. Father René Laurentin, Bernadette of Lourdes: A Life Based on Authenticated Documents (English translation 1979). The standard scholarly biography. Catholic Encyclopedia (1907), "Bernadette Soubirous," available at newadvent.org. ↩

2. The principal source for the apparitions is Bernadette's own testimony preserved in the diocesan archive of Tarbes-Lourdes. The eighteen apparitions are summarized in Laurentin, op. cit., and in the official histories of the Sanctuary of Lourdes. ↩

3. Saint-Gildard (Nevers), Documents Bernadette, the convent's archive of materials from her religious life. The exhumations of her body in 1909, 1919, and 1925 are documented in the canonization records preserved at the Vatican. ↩

4. Lourdes Bureau of Medical Verification, official list of recognized miracles. The bureau is independent of the Sanctuary administration and applies strict medical and theological criteria to claimed healings. Pope Saint John Paul II, message instituting the World Day of the Sick (13 May 1992). All available at vatican.va. ↩