St. Bernadette

Bernadette Soubirous was a saint whose holiness was tested not chiefly by the apparitions at Lourdes, remarkable as those were, but by the long and painful years that followed them. She was fourteen when the Lady appeared to her in the hollow of the Massabielle rock between February and July of 1858, and the life at the grotto — the digging in the mud, the drinking from the spring, the lighted candles, the enormous crowds — is well known. The pattern of the apparitions deserves careful attention. But what came after is equally important: the years of questioning by Church authorities and civil officials, the exhausting curiosity of people who treated Bernadette as an attraction, and finally her removal to the convent of the Sisters of Notre Dame at Nevers.

It is at Nevers that the more hidden Bernadette emerges. She was not a mystic in the technical sense; she was a simple, often sick, direct, and sometimes sharp young woman who discovered that the vision in the grotto had not made her life easier but harder. She was frequently ill. She suffered both physically and in the repeated interior dryness that characterized the second half of her life. Her reply when people pressed her on the apparitions and on her own importance was characteristic: she had been used as a broom, she said, and when the work was done, had been put back in the corner. The hidden years at Nevers, the suffering without consolation, the fidelity to ordinary religious life when everything remarkable had been left behind — these make her a saint in the full sense. She was canonized in 1933.