Saint of the week: Bernadette Soubirous

In my junior year of high school, as I prepared to receive the sacrament of Confirmation, our parish formation director gave us a deadline to submit  our “Confirmation names.” (If you’re not familiar with the Catholic process, each Confirmation candidate chooses a saint whom she admires and relates to as a personal patron. When the candidate receives the sacrament, the bishop calls her by this patron saint’s name to signify the shared call to discipleship.)

In the midst of school, clubs, chores, a job, and absolutely essential hours of talking on the phone every night, I forgot about the deadline. It came and went. The formation director gently reminded me several times. Then finally one Sunday at Mass, she cornered me and said, “If you don’t tell me your saint’s name right now I am picking one for you.” 

A name blinked brightly in my mind, although I had not once thought of it until that very moment: Bernadette. A few weeks later, I stood as the bishop crossed my forehead with chrism, saying, “Bernadette, be sealed with the Holy Spirit.” 

Bernadette. I knew so little about her—just that she had received an apparition of Our Lady at Lourdes—but I had no personal connection or devotion. Why had her name come to me so vividly? After Confirmation, I really didn’t think of her much again. Other saints became close friends, but Bernadette remained tucked away from my interest.

Then, decades after my Confirmation, I found myself leading a pilgrimage of high school girls across France. One of our stops would be Nevers, where St Bernadette Soubirous lived her entire adult life in a modest convent, and where her incorrupt body remains today. For the first time, I began wondering: Who are you? 

From her birth in 1844 in Lourdes, France, Marie-Bernarde Soubirous lived a fragile life. Her family suffered extreme poverty. Bernadette could hardly read or write well into her teenage years because frequent illness like cholera and severe asthma kept her away from school. She spoke only a highly localized village dialect, not French—a reflection of her family’s obscurity and limited contact with the greater society. In fact, “Bernadette” was a nickname of this patois. The family’s poverty sometimes forced them to find housing in terrible conditions, like an abandoned prison basement. 

One day at age 14, Bernadette, her younger sister, and their cousin were sent out to collect firewood from a nearby grotto. A stream passed in front of the area, so while her sister and cousin splashed ahead and ran off to gather sticks, fragile Bernadette hesitated as she looked for a place to cross without getting wet. She couldn’t find one, so she sighed and paused to remove her shoes and stockings. Suddenly, the sound of rushing wind roared through the grotto. Bernadette instinctively looked up. Immediately she felt confused: she had clearly heard a strong wind, yet not a leaf, branch, nor hair had moved. And then: a radiant light poured from the little grotto. Her heart quickened. What was happening? She splashed across the stream toward the grotto and saw a beautiful young girl—maybe 12 or 13 years old, according to Bernadette—standing above the grotto. Bernadette did not know who she was, but the girl’s heavenly beauty filled Bernadette’s heart like an electric force. 

When the other girls returned, they found Bernadette on her knees gazing upward. Bernadette was shocked to realize that they saw only air and space above the grotto. What was happening? All she knew was that the beautiful girl had asked her to return, and nothing would stop her. 

She later wrote about this moment: “I lifted up my eyes in the direction of the Grotto. I saw a lady dressed in white: she had a white dress, a blue sash and a yellow rose on each foot, the same colour as the chain of her rosary. When I had seen that, I rubbed my eyes; I thought I was mistaken. I put my hand in my pocket; I found my rosary. I wanted to make a sign of the cross; I could not bring my hand to my forehead: it fell down. The vision made the sign of the cross. Then my hand trembled; I tried to do it and I could. I started to say the rosary; the vision moved the beads of her own, but she did not move her lips. When I had finished my rosary, the vision disappeared all of a sudden. I asked the two others if they had seen anything, they said no.”

This would be the first of eighteen apparitions Bernadette received over the next several weeks. As has happened with other Marian visionaries, Bernadette faced immediate scrutiny, accusations, disbelief, and even shame from her embarrassed family who thought she was lying or experiencing a psychological event. But Bernadette never wavered: The beautiful girl is there. She asks me to tell the people to pray. To do penance. To build a chapel at the grotto. To hold a procession. And then, one day in late February, to dig a spring. 

Crowds had begun to follow Bernadette to the grotto for the sensation and spectacle. That day they gasped as Bernadette gazed upward at what looked to everyone else like empty space, and began digging with her hands in the muddy ground. Surely she was mad! What a shame to see her family so humiliated! But then clear water started bubbling from the ground. And this time everyone saw with their own eyes: a fresh spring in Lourdes.

Not until the sixteenth vision did Bernadette finally receive an answer to her repeated question, “Who are you?” The heavenly girl finally answered—in the dialect of Bernadette’s village—“I am the Immaculate Conception.” 

Lourdes rapidly gained renown as a pilgrimage site of healing. Since Bernadette dug the spring, more than 70 miraculous cures have been attributed to immersion in its waters. Quickly after the apparitions ended, Lourdes was developed with chapels and shrines for the growing numbers of pilgrims. In 1876, a massive basilica was consecrated at Lourdes. Lourdes remains one of the most-visited pilgrimage destinations in the world. 

For her part, Bernadette despised the public attention that came with her visions. She suffered deeply the sting of the shame, disbelief, and scorn thrown at her. She disagreed strenuously with the later statues and images that portrayed Our Lady of Lourdes as an adult—they made her “too old, too big,” Bernadette said.  She wanted only to obey Our Lady. 

After the apparitions ended, Bernadette felt an increasing desire to leave Lourdes. She entered the Sisters of Charity at Nevers, relieved to spend her days in prayer, silence, and community work like embroidering altar cloths and vestments. She served as a sacristan and worked in the convent infirmary. 

The sisters of course knew about Bernadette’s visions. Some sisters persecuted Bernadette even inside the convent, accusing her of faking the visions and seeking attention. Sometimes others asked her to retell the stories, although she disliked talking about the experience. She would demur and say, “The Virgin used me as a broom to remove the dust. When the work is done, the broom is put behind the door again.” 

Bernadette did not have long to live—in 1879, only 35, Bernadette died of tuberculosis while praying the rosary. During her deathbed suffering, she repeated over and over, “All this is good for Heaven!” Her last words were, “Blessed Mary, Mother of God, pray for me.”

When we went to Nevers, the sisters were surprised and overjoyed to have visitors. They told us that few pilgrims ever come to Nevers; most go to Lourdes for the spring and the basilica. The sisters brought us to Bernadette’s bedroom and the infirmary where she died. “This is the crucifix she looked at as she was dying,” they told us, pointing to the wall across the room. They showed us her few personal effects and her clothes, embroidered with her initials “B.S.”

When I saw Bernadette in her glass coffin in the small convent chapel, she looked peaceful, beautiful, tiny. She is a saint who left no books or diaries. Except for the incredible miracle at Lourdes, Bernadette lived a supremely humble and obscure life. Most of it was embroidered with suffering of all kinds. Yet Bernadette had a heart like a diamond—her heart was made stronger, radiant, precious by the pressure. 

Bernadette’s diamond heart is a prism of the most critical truth as we make our own way through this life: Heaven is our true home and joy. 

During one apparition, Our Lady had promised Bernadette: “I do not promise to make you happy in this world, but in the other.” As Bernadette strived to do from that moment, so should we. Everything we do and say and create and seek must be oriented toward Heaven. 

She said: “I shall spend every moment loving. One who loves does not notice her trials; or perhaps more accurately, she is able to love them. I shall do everything for Heaven, my true home. There I shall find my Mother in all the splendour of her glory. I shall delight with her in the joy of Jesus himself in perfect safety.”

Her feast is April 16. 

Pilgrimage and still-grimage with St Bernadette

• Read this fascinating biography rich with Bernadette’s own testaments: Bernadette Speaks: A Life of St Bernadette Soubirous in Her Own Words 

• Watch the excellent classic film The Song of Bernadette

• Visit the website of the Lourdes Sanctuary for resources on learning more about Lourdes and making pilgrimage there 

• Visit the convent at Nevers where Bernadette's incorrupt body remains on display for veneration

• In the United States, you can visit the Shrine of St Bernadette in Albuqerque, New Mexico

• Reflect on St Bernadette's words: “If one dream should fall and break into a thousand pieces… never be afraid to pick one of those pieces up and begin again. That’s the beauty of being alive: We can always start all over again. Enjoy God’s amazing opportunities bestowed on us. Have faith in Him always.”

  • What are the deepest dreams and desires of your heart?

  • What do you think God’s dreams for you are?

  • How do you want to spend your life? At the end of your life, what words do you hope will describe you and how you have lived?

  • What prevents you from being wholly yourself as God has made you to be?