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February 11, 2008, marked exactly 150 years since the first apparition took place at the foot of a hill called Massabielle, near the small town of Lourdes in France. Bernadette Soubirous, aged fourteen, was out with her younger sister and a friend looking for firewood to sell in exchange for bread. Her two companions waded across a stream and left her taking off her shoes and stockings. Suddenly, she saw a figure in the opening of a grotto. It looked to her like a beautiful young lady of fifteen or sixteen, surrounded by light and holding a rosary. Instinctively, Bernadette pulled out her own rosary and began to pray. When she finished her prayers the Lady bowed, smiled at her and disappeared…
Bernadette Soubirous is the saint of Lourdes, France. Visionary and messenger of the Immaculate Conception, she told us the very words of the Virgin Mary, spoken in the native Basque tongue of Southern France and Northern Spain. She spoke words teaching of the merits of prayer, penance, poverty and church. In the first and most widely recognized Marian apparition of modern times, a personal message was delivered also to Bernadette—She would not find happiness in this world, but only in the next…
In the middle of the nineteenth century, Lourdes was a small garrison town of four or five thousand inhabitants, situated in the foothills of the Pyrénées on the River Gave. It had a castle fortress, the sign of a fighting past, and for its size was up-to-date and progressive with the bulk of the population consisting of agricultural workers and quarrymen,and in the main practising Catholics…
Bernadette Soubirous is very closely associated with Gods plan and works in Lourdes. That is why I would like you to get to know her better. She is a Saint who is an ordinary person like you and I, it is her humanity and living the true gospel, which make her so attractive. She was just fourteen and did not know her catechism or her French. Bernadette Soubirous was taken in by the Hospice de Lourdes, run by the Soeurs de la Charité de Nevers (Sisters of Charity of Nevers), in January 1858 to learn to read and write in preparation for her first communion…
