Saint of the month: St. Bernadette

Feast day: April 16
Patroness: of illness, people ridiculed for their piety, poverty, shepherds, shepherdesses, and Lourdes, France
Birth: January 7, 1844
Death: April 16, 1879
Beatified: 1925
Canonized: by Pope Pius XI on December 1933
 
St. Bernadette was born in Lourdes, France on January 7, 1844. Her parents were very poor and she was the first of nine children. As a toddler, Bernadette contracted cholera and suffered extreme asthma. Unfortunately, she lived the rest of her life in poor health.

On February 11, 1858, 14-year-old Bernadette was sent with her younger sister and a friend to gather firewood, when a very beautiful lady appeared to her above a rose bush in a grotto called Massabielle. The woman wore blue and white and smiled at Bernadette before making the sign of the cross with a rosary of ivory and gold. Bernadette fell to her knees, took out her own rosary and began to pray. Bernadette later described the woman as “a small young lady.” Though her sister and friend claimed they were unable to see her, Bernadette knew what she saw was real.

On February 18, Bernadette said “the vision” asked her to return to the grotto each day for a fortnight. With each visit, Bernadette saw the Virgin Mary and the period of daily visions became known as “holy fortnight.” On February 25, the vision had told her “to drink of the water of the spring, to wash in it and to eat the herb that grew there” as an act of penance. The next day, the grotto's muddy waters had been cleared and fresh clear water flowed.

During her sixteenth vision on March 25, Bernadette claimed she had asked the woman her name, but her question was only met with a smile. Bernadette asked again, three more times, and finally the woman said, “I am the Immaculate Conception.”

Bernadette asked the local priest to build a chapel at the site of her visions and the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes is now one of the major Catholic pilgrimage sites in the world. Many other chapels and churches has been built around it, including the Basilica of St. Pius X, which can accommodate 25,000 people and was dedicated by the future Pope John XXIII when he was the Papal Nuncio to France.

Bernadette later took the religious habit of a postulant and joined the Sisters of Charity at their motherhouse at Nevers. She was diagnosed with tuberculosis of the bone in her right knee and was unable to take part in convent life. She died in the Sainte Croix (Holy Cross) Infirmary of the Convent of Saint-Gildard at the age of 35 on April 16, 1879, while praying the holy rosary. Bernadette's last words were, “Blessed Mary, Mother of God, pray for me. A poor sinner, a poor sinner.”

She is buried in a gold and crystal reliquary in the Chapel of Saint Bernadette at the mother house in Nevers.