The Saints: St. Bernadette

1844-1879 / Feast - April 16

In 1858 Marie Bernarde Soubirous, the sickly eldest child of a poor French miller, had 18 visions of a young, beautiful lady in a cave near Lourdes. Identifying herself as the Immaculate Conception, the lady asked for prayers and penitence. After entering the Sisters of Charity, Bernadette was somewhat sheltered from all that she had experienced as the Lourdes visionary. Sick with asthma and tuberculosis, she died at 35. Lourdes became a place of healing, one of Christianity’s greatest pilgrimage sites.