[Reposted and revised.]
TODAY is the anniversary of the day in 1858 that a 14-year-old peasant girl, Bernadette Soubirous, had the first of numerous visions in a grotto in Lourdes, France in the Pyrenees mountains. A beautiful young woman appeared to her.
“Her face was oval in shape, and ‘of an incomparable grace,’ her yes were blue, her voice ‘Oh, so sweet!'”
Bernadette’s recollection are described in the book by Abbe Francois Trochu, Saint Bernadette Soubirous, first published in France in 1954:
“I had hardly begun to take off my stocking when I heard the sound of wind, as in a storm. I turned towards the meadow, and I saw that the trees were not moving at all. I had half-noticed, but without paying any particular heed, that the branches and brambles were waving beside the grotto.
I went on taking my stockings off, and was putting one foot into the water, when I heard the same sound in front of me. I looked up and saw a cluster of branches and brambles underneath the topmost opening in the grotto tossing and swaying to and fro, though nothing else stirred all around.
Behind these branches and within the opening, I saw immediately afterwards a girl in white, no bigger than myself, who greeted me with a slight bow of the head; at the same time, she stretched out her arms slightly away from her body, opening her hands, as in pictures of Our Lady; over her right arm hung a rosary.
I was afraid. I stepped back. I wanted to call the two little girls; I hadn’t the courage to do so. I rubbed my eyes again and again: I thought I must be mistaken.
Raising my eyes again, I saw the girl smiling at me most graciously and seeming to invite me to come nearer. But I was still afraid. It was not however a fear such as I have had at other times, for I would have stayed there for ever looking at her: whereas, when you are afraid, you run away quickly.
The lady or “girl” would return and communicate with Bernadette 16 times in the ensuing months. She is now known as Our Lady of Lourdes. Her timing was apt. Convulsed by the revolutions of 1848, the 19th-century was undergoing great changes.
Bernadette faced intense opposition from her parents, her teachers, her neighbors, the clergy and the local police, who threatened her with arrest. Her parents initially forbade her to return to the grotto. Many were converted to the view that she was telling the truth when they saw her experience one of her apparitions, so transfixed and transformed was this small, humble child. Twenty thousand people came to watch during the 14th apparition. But no one else saw what she saw or experienced the same incomparable ecstasy. Read More »