Our Lady of Lourdes

All that we know of the apparitions comes through one witness. "She alone saw the Lady," says the Sanctuary, "and all depends on her testimony." So we start with her.

Bernadette Soubirous was born on 7 January 1844 at the Boly Mill in Lourdes, a market town at the foot of the Pyrenees. She was the first child of François Soubirous, a miller, and Louise Castérot, who had married for love. The Sanctuary stresses that her first ten years were happy and that this gave her a strong and balanced nature, in spite of what came next.

Then the family lost the mill and fell into real poverty. By 1858 they were living in one wretched room known as the Cachot. Bernadette was small, about 1.40 metres tall, and she had asthma. She helped at home and at her aunt's. She had scarcely been to school, and the abstract words of the catechism would not stay in her memory. At 14 she could not read or write, and she had not yet made her First Communion. She had been sent to the village of Bartrès in September 1857, and came home on 21 January 1858 because she wanted to prepare for it. She spoke the local dialect of the Pyrenees, not French.

She was lively, quick and honest, and sometimes proud and touchy. People who met her noticed her common sense.

The dates and details below follow the Sanctuary's own list. The numbers of people are the Sanctuary's.

Bernadette did not call the Lady the Blessed Virgin at first. She said "Aquerò". When Jacomet wrote "the Holy Virgin", she corrected him: she had not said that.

Pope Pius IX had defined the Immaculate Conception on 8 December 1854: by a unique grace of God, in view of the merits of Christ, Mary was kept from all stain of original sin from the first moment of her existence. Bernadette, who had not had her First Communion, did not know the phrase. The Sanctuary says the words troubled the parish priest, Father Peyramale. It was now clear that the Lady had given a name the girl herself could not explain.

Bernadette faced the police commissioner, and a judge who threatened prison. Later she had to answer civil and religious commissions, journalists and crowds. She was not moved by threats or by offers of money. "I'm charged with telling you, not with making you believe," she said. She accepted no payment and refused to bless rosaries. Of pictures of herself sold for ten sous she said: "Ten sous, that's all I'm worth!"

The grotto itself was closed. Common accounts date the barrier to 8 June 1858, by order of the local authorities acting for the prefect. They say the Emperor Napoleon III ordered it reopened in early October 1858. We have these dates from secondary accounts, not from the Sanctuary's own pages. The Sanctuary's list confirms the barrier on 16 July.

Bishop Laurence moved slowly. On 28 July 1858 he set up a commission of inquiry. His final judgment drew on Bernadette's testimony and on the cures linked to the water. The mayor, Anselme Lacadé, had the water analysed in 1858. The Catholic Encyclopedia reports that an official chemist found no natural healing properties in it.

The bishop waited almost four years. His pastoral letter of 18 January 1862 weighs Bernadette herself: "the simplicity, the candour, the modesty of this child". He asks whether she could have been deceived or hallucinating, and he finds no sign of it. He notes that the visions did not depend on her wishes, since twice in the fortnight she went and the Lady did not come. An extract is engraved in marble in the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception.

Life in the Cachot had become impossible, with crowds always at the door. She made her First Communion on 3 June 1858, between the apparitions. On 15 July 1860 she was received at the hospice of the Sisters of Nevers in Lourdes "as a sick poor person". There, at 16, she learned to read and write. She nursed the sick and looked for her vocation. "My mission in Lourdes is finished," she said.

On 4 July 1866 she left Lourdes for good, and she reached the motherhouse at Nevers three days later. She told her story once to the assembled sisters, and then was not to speak of it. She took the name Sister Marie Bernard, and made her profession in October 1867. "I came here to hide myself," she said. She served in the infirmary and the sacristy until her own illness took over. The bishop had said her work would be prayer, and she took this seriously. She wrote to the Pope that her weapons were prayer and sacrifice. She never returned to the grotto.

She died at Nevers on 16 April 1879, aged 35, after long illness.

The Church is slow here. Most people who go to Lourdes come home with the same illness, and many say they received something else: peace, strength, the grace to carry it.

The numbers. The Sanctuary says that more than 7,000 cases have been studied by the Medical Bureau, and 72 have been declared miraculous by the Church. The most recent is Antonietta Raco, an Italian woman with primary lateral sclerosis, cured after a pilgrimage in 2009, whose healing was proclaimed by Bishop Vincenzo Orofino of Tursi-Lagonegro on 16 April 2025.

The process. The Medical Bureau at Lourdes dates from 1883. Any doctor may take part, whatever their nationality or belief. Only a few of the cases it opens are studied in depth. Those go to the International Medical Committee of Lourdes, about twenty specialists of different nations. They ask whether the cure was unexpected, complete and lasting, and whether it is unexplained in the present state of medical knowledge. The study often takes many years.

The last step. Doctors do not declare miracles. They can only say a cure is unexplained. The bishop of the diocese of the person healed then judges whether it should be called a miracle, a sign from God.

The water. Analysis has found no natural healing power in it, and the Church does not teach that it has any power of its own. It is a sign, used with faith and prayer. Many who were cured never bathed in it, as the Catholic Encyclopedia notes.

Critics. Sceptics have long doubted these cures, and some argue that an unexplained cure simply awaits a future explanation. The method allows for this by setting the medical question apart from the judgment of faith. No Catholic is bound to accept any single healing.

Bernadette's body. Her body was exhumed in 1909, 1919 and 1925, during the process for her cause. The doctors' reports describe it as well preserved, though not unchanged: Dr Comte in 1919 wrote of parts as "practically mummified". For the 1925 exposition, the face and hands were covered with wax. It rests in a glass reliquary in the chapel at Nevers. The Church did not canonise her for this.

The statue. Joseph-Hugues Fabisch made the statue in the grotto, dedicated on 4 April 1864. It shows a taller and older figure than the one Bernadette described.

The rose bush. The sign Father Peyramale asked for was never given. That is worth remembering. The Lady gave her name, not a show.