Our Lady of Lourdes

Today the Church remembers Our Lady of Lourdes, and the story begins with a poor young girl named Bernadette Soubirous. She was born in Lourdes in 1844, in a mill, the eldest of six children. The French farm crisis overwhelmed the family, who ended up living in a place called the *cachot*: a single room of sixteen square meters, dark and unhealthy, which had once been the town jail and had been moved elsewhere precisely because it was so foul. In there, breathing that air, Bernadette caught the asthma she would carry for the rest of her life. She was so frail that she looked younger than she was. It was to this girl — not to a learned mystic, not to a nun — that in 1858, in a grotto outside town called Massabielle, there appeared what she described simply as “a lady dressed in white.” From those apparitions one of the greatest pilgrimage sites in the Catholic world was born. Bernadette gained nothing from it: she entered the convent in Nevers, where she died in 1879, at thirty-five. She was proclaimed a saint in 1933. The Smorfia gives the Madonna the number eight. If your name is Bernadette or Bernardetta, today is your name day, along with every Mary who carries Lourdes in her name. The detail that stays with you isn’t the grotto: it’s that, having to choose whom to speak to, the choice fell on the poorest daughter in town.