St. Bernadette Soubirous
Feast 04-16 · Canonized 1933
Patron of
About
Bernadette Soubirous was born in 1844 in Lourdes, France, the eldest child of a poor miller's family. In 1858, at the age of fourteen, she reported a series of apparitions of a lady in a grotto near the river Gave. The lady identified herself as the Immaculate Conception and asked that a chapel be built and that people come in procession.
A spring that appeared at the grotto soon became associated with remarkable healings, and Lourdes grew into one of the world's great pilgrimage sites. Bernadette herself sought no fame; in 1866 she entered the Sisters of Charity of Nevers, where she lived quietly as a nurse and sacristan.
She suffered from chronic illness, including tuberculosis of the bone, and died in 1879 at the age of thirty-five. She was canonized in 1933 and is invoked as a patron of the sick and of those who suffer bodily illness.
Suggested prayer
O God, who revealed the Immaculate Conception to Bernadette at the grotto of Lourdes and made its waters a sign of healing, grant through her intercession healing of body and soul to all who are sick. We ask this through Christ our Lord. Amen.
