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Saint Bernadette Soubirous of Lourdes
Since then, the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to Bernadette 18 times. On the ninth apparition, Bernadette was asked by the Lady to drink from the spring. Finding none nearby, Bernadette began digging with her bare hands in a muddy patch and drank a few drops of muddy water in which the Lady also asked her to eat some loose grasses. Many onlookers, disgusted by Bernadette's face which was covered in mud, until her relatives wiped it clean with a handkerchief, returned home in dismay, proclaiming it a fraud. However, in the days following the apparition, water started flowing from the muddy ground where Bernadette had been digging. From this water flowed a spring in which people started to have miraculous healing experiences. Today, the miraculous spring at Lourdes remains one of the greatest locations of Catholic pilgrimage.
This is the incorruptible body of Catholic Saint Bernadette Soubirous of Lourdes, France in the Church of St. Gildard at the convent in Nevers, France where her body, enclosed in a glass coffin, is laid undisturbed and on view since August 3, 1925.
Bernadette, whose complete name is Marie Bernarde Soubirous, was born to a very poor family on January 7, 1844. She was a very sickly child having suffered sever asthma, and was such a poor student that she took her first Holy Communion at aged 14 in 1858.
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| The Soubirous Family |
On February 11 of the same year, the Blessed Virgin Mary, standing in a niche in the rock, appeared to Bernadette who was gathering firewood with her sister, Marie and a friend along the river Gave at the grotto of Massabielle in the outskirts of Lourdes. The apparition became known through out the Catholics as the Apparition at Lourdes. In her own words, Bernadette described the vision she saw:
"I came back towards the grotto and started taking off my stockings. I had hardly taken off the first stocking when I heard a sound like a gust of wind. Then I turned my head towards the meadow. I saw the trees quite still: I went on taking off my stockings. I heard the same sound again. As I raised my head to look at the grotto, I saw a Lady dressed in white, wearing a white dress, a blue girdle and a yellow rose on each foot, the same color as the chain of her rosary; the beads of the rosary were white."
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| The young Bernadette |
On the March 25, 1858, the Blessed Virgin appeared for the 15th time and identified herself as the "Immaculate Conception." This very title by which the Blessed Virgin Mary identified herself, confirmed the pious belief which Pope Pius IX, 4 years earlier, had raised to the dignity of a dogma of the infallible Church
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