St. Bernadette Soubirous

Who they were

Bernadette was fourteen, the asthmatic eldest daughter of a ruined miller, living in a single room that had been the town jail, when in 1858 she saw a lady in the rock grotto at Lourdes, eighteen times over five months. She never varied her account under years of interrogation, never profited from it, and reported the lady's name in her own dialect: the Immaculate Conception, a phrase the theologians noted she could not have been taught. At the lady's direction she dug at the ground and uncovered the spring that still runs, to which millions travel every year, many of them sick. She left for a convent at Nevers, worked as an infirmarian, and died at thirty-five of tuberculosis of the bone, in pain she described as her real work. "The spring is not for me," she said.

Why people turn to St. Bernadette Soubirous

She is the human being at the center of the Church's largest healing shrine, and she was sick, poor, and dismissed for most of her short life. The sick ask her because she was one of them, not because she was spared.

How to ask their intercession

Name the illness. If a trip to Lourdes is real for you, ask her prayers for it; if it never will be, she is not location-dependent. ---