St. Bernadette
Fourteen, asthmatic, and living in an old jail. Nobody believed her for years.
The Soubirous family had lost their mill and were living in a single room that had been the town jail because nobody else wanted it. Bernadette was the oldest, small for fourteen, and sick most of the time.
She was collecting firewood by the river when she saw a young woman standing in a hollow in the rock. It happened eighteen times. The police questioned her, the priest questioned her, her own mother told her to stop, and she never changed a single detail of what she said.
One day the woman told her to dig in the dirt, so she dug in the dirt with her hands and made a muddy mess in front of a crowd of people who laughed at her. The spring that opened there is still running. About six million people a year come to Lourdes to see it.
St. Bernadette facts for kids
- She saw the apparitions 18 times, starting in February 1858
- She was interrogated by police, by the town, and by the Church, and never changed her story
- She dug the spring at Lourdes with her bare hands while onlookers laughed
- She refused to profit from it and spent the rest of her life quietly as a nun
Feast day: April 16 · Patron of the sick and the poor
Proper to the calendar of France.
St. Bernadette, help me tell the truth even when nobody claps.