The Life of Saint Bernadette Soubirous
Saint Bernadette was born in 1844 in Lourdes, France. At her baptism she was given the name Marie-Bernarde, but she became known as Bernadette.
Her father was François Soubirous and her mother Louise Castérot. They were good parents who raised her well. Her father worked as a miller for a very wealthy family, and he and his family lived at the mill. Then the country went through an economic crisis, and debts forced the family to leave the mill and move into a small room inside a former jail, the “cachot”, which belonged to a cousin of François.
The family of six, mother, father and four children, lived in a single room. The girls were the eldest: Bernadette was the oldest, then Toinette (two and a half years younger), followed by Jean-Marie and Justin. François and Louise took whatever work they could find to feed their children. The family still had some means when Bernadette was born, as shown by the fact that she was placed with a wet nurse for six months. The nurse, Marie Aravant-Lagües, lived in Bartrès near Lourdes; she cared for little Bernadette and nursed her, and deep ties remained between the two families, as tradition required. The family’s financial difficulties allowed Marie to take charge of Bernadette, supposedly to help her with other children, but this was only an excuse to have her tend the sheep, so Bernadette worked as a shepherdess without pay.
To persuade Bernadette to go to Bartrès, she was told she could prepare for her First Communion there with the parish priest; she was fourteen and had not yet received the sacrament. But her employers, seeing how hard she worked, made her spend more and more time with the sheep, which kept her from attending catechism classes.
The two children of the host family went to catechism every morning, while she had to go to the fields, which hurt her deeply. People began to doubt Bernadette’s intelligence.
It is true that she learned with difficulty, and she herself said she had a poor memory; but since she was deprived of the chance to study, Bernadette reached the age of thirteen without knowing how to read or write. The schoolmaster Jean Barbet, who had the opportunity to teach her catechism, said: “She has trouble memorizing the words of the catechism because she cannot study it, not knowing how to read; but she makes great efforts to understand the meaning of the explanations.
Moreover, she is very attentive, devout and very humble.” There is no doubt that Bernadette knew how to make the most of the great treasure God had given her: a heart full of wonderful Christian virtues, innocence, kindness, goodness, charity and gentleness. The parish priest, Father Ader, was able to see the depths of Bernadette’s heart in just a few meetings.
She believed firmly in the apparitions of La Salette (1846), and she was even compared to the children of La Salette. When Bernadette realized that preparing for her First Communion in Bartrès was impossible, she asked Marie Lagües to let her go back to Lourdes and asked her parents to take her home. She wanted to receive First Communion and start catechism right away. Her parents agreed, and she returned to Lourdes on January 28, 1858, two weeks before the first apparition of the Blessed Virgin.
It is worth noting that when Bernadette could not receive her First Communion, she turned to the Virgin Mary and prayed the rosary every day. Our Lady opened the doors for her and entrusted her with her message for the whole world. She revealed to this holy fourteen-year-old child that she was “the Immaculate Conception”. Our Lady appeared to her eighteen times and asked her to tell the priests to build a chapel on the site of the apparitions. But during this period Saint Bernadette faced many troubles. She went through several spiritual struggles, like the devil’s temptations of Jesus after forty days in the desert, but she held firm because Our Lady was with her. In her apparitions, Our Lady asked her to call sinners to repentance and to pray for them. At Our Lady’s request, Bernadette dug in the ground near the grotto (the site of the apparitions), and at once fresh water sprang up. Bernadette drank from it, and this little spring became a spring of graces that has healed many who were sick in soul and body, and still does to this day.
Crowds gathered at the spot, praying and pleading from the depths of their hearts. After the apparitions ended, Bernadette entered the convent of the Sisters of Charity of Nevers and became a nun. She did much to help those in need. She contracted tuberculosis and bore the pain of her illness with joy and inner peace during her novitiate, and she was admitted to profession on her sickbed. She spent her life serving the sick and the Church. Despite her great suffering she remained kind and always smiling, as she had always been known. She entered eternal life on April 16, 1879, at the age of thirty-five. Her body is preserved incorrupt to this day in a glass reliquary in the chapel of the Convent of Saint-Gildard in Nevers. She was canonized on December 8, 1933. Her feast is celebrated in France on February 18, because on that date, during the third apparition, Our Lady, without yet telling her name, promised to make her happy, not in this world but in the next, for she would live in heaven. Other countries celebrate her on the day of her death, April 16.
May her prayer be with us.
Prepared by Rita, of the Sawt el Rab team
