Saint of the Day: St. Bernadette Soubirous

Religious Sister (1844-1879)

Her life

+ Marie Bernadette Soubirous was born in Lourdes, France. A simple girl with a great deal of common sense, she suffered from asthma as a child and was often ill. This was only exacerbated by her family’s severe poverty.

+ On February 11, 1858, she experienced the first in a series of visions of the Virgin Mary in a grotto at Massabielle. The message she received was a call for penance for the conversion of sinners, as well as a request that the grotto become a place of pilgrimage.

+ A chapel was constructed at the site in 1862 and Lourdes soon became the most popular pilgrimage site in Europe.

+ Bernadette hated the attention she received from pilgrims and curious visitors. In 1866, she was accepted into the community of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Nevers.

+ After living humbly and simply in her community, embracing a straightforward approach to holiness based on her community’s rule, Saint Beradette died after several years of illness of April 16, 1879. In considering her cause for canonization, the Church honored her for her life of prayer, devotion, and service and not for her visions. She was canonized in 1933.

For prayer and reflection

“Like newborn infants, you must long for the pure, spiritual milk,

that in him you may grow to salvation, alleluia.”—Entrance Antiphon for the Second Sunday of Easter

Prayer

God of everlasting mercy,
who in the very recurrence of the paschal feast
kindle the faith of the people you have made your own,
increase, we pray, the grace you have bestowed,
that all may grasp and rightly understand
in what font they have been washed,
by whose Spirit they have been reborn,
by whose Blood they have been redeemed.
Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,
who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
God, for ever and ever. Amen.
(from The Roman Missal)

Saint profiles prepared by Brother Silas Henderson, S.D.S.