The Story of St Bemadette

 Advertisement

The story of Lourdes began in February 1858 when a fourteen-year-old peasant girl named Bemadette Soubirous looked upwards and saw what she considered to be an apparition of the Virgin Mary.

Bemadette claimed that she beheld the apparition a further seventeen times. Considering that Lourdes today is held in such reverence by so many pilgrims, it may surprise many that Bemadette's claim to have seen the Virgin Mary was initially met with great suspicion by many people, including her parish priest, who went so far as to accuse her of lying.

Others more tolerantly regarded her as a young girl with a fertile imagination who craved attention, while others were so hostile towards her that they physically attacked her. Bemadette began to refer to the vision as 'Aquero', which in local dialect meant 'that one'.

It was when Bemadette found the courage to talk to the vision that she was told by the mysterious 'lady in white': 'I cannot promise happiness to you in this world, only in the next.' During the ninth apparition, Bemadette was told to search in a muddy grotto, and it was here that she came across a spring, the story quickly spreading throughout the village that the water that flowed from it would provide a miracle cure to people who were afflicted by illness if they drank it.

If indeed Bemadette was a young girl who merely craved attention, then she was certainly getting it by now, with thousands of people from the village and beyond gathering at the site of the alleged miracle, hopeful that they would behold the Virgin Mary in front of them. Nonetheless, the whole spectacle was still viewed with deep suspicion and hostility by many.

Her parish priest was as sceptical as he was when she told him about the first vision, and the commissioner of police regarded her as a nuisance, warning her not to make any more visits to the spring. She was interviewed by several people in authority, who were becoming increasingly concerned about the amount of people who were congregating at the spring. During one of the last apparitions to take place, the figure told her that a shrine should be built at the place where the sightings occurred.

The parish priest, when told of this by Bemadette, retorted that he would only believe such a story if a miracle occurred that could be witnessed by the mass of people gathered there, not just Bemadette. But although such an event would take place later, something happened that made the Roman Catholic authorities treat the matter seriously for the first time. On another visit to the spring, the white figure appeared to Bemadette again and told her that she was 'the Immaculate Conception'.

A week later, Bemadette went to the same spot where, by this time, crowds would regularly be gathering to pay homage. She carried a solitary candle and looked awestruck at what many now considered to be the Virgin Mary. Astonishingly, she felt no pain as the flame on the candle burnt downwards and dropped searing wax on her hands. Even more astonishing was the fact that there were no bum marks on her hands. These two occurrences finally convinced the parish priest that Bemadette was speaking the truth.

By now, pilgrims were arriving from all over the world, finally convinced that the apparition that appeared before Bemadette so many times was the Virgin Mary, and that it was her miraculous powers that caused the water to flow from the spring.

Bemadette, now unable to lead a normal life, found sanctuary in the local nunnery, where she remained until her death in 1879 at the age of thirty-five. Bernadette was beatified in 1925 and canonized eight years later.

One final footnote is worth mentioning. Before her sanctification, the court of canonization set up a commission, which entailed opening the sarcophagus, followed by exhumation and examination of the body. Considering that more than forty years had passed since Bernadette's death, the physicians were stunned at what they saw.

Franz Werfel, in his book The Song of Bernadette, wrote that: 'Bernadette's girlish body showed no signs of corruption. It was almost unchanged. Face, hands and arms were white and their flesh soft. The mouth was a little open, as though breathing, so that the shimmer of the teeth was visible. The body itself was rigid and so firm that the nuns of Nevers, who witnessed the official exhumation, were able to lift it and deposit it unharmed in a new coffin, like that of one just dead.'