The history of Marian appearances that have shaped Lourdes

“Who are you taking me for?” I know that if the Blessed Virgin chose me, it is because I was the most ignorant. If she had found a plus ignorant than me, she would have chosen it. So says Bernadette, without detour. Bernadette Soubirous was born at the Boly mill on January 7, 1844. She was baptized two days later, in the parish church of Saint-Pierre, in Lourdes.

Bernadette is the eldest of nine children, five of whom die at a young age. Her health is fragile, but she has the temperament soaked. His parents, François Soubirous (1807-1871) and Louise Casterot (1825-1866), exploited the Moulin de Boly. It is a family where we know the work and where we love each other. Where we also have faith pegged to the body and where prayer is deeply inscribed in life.

► Video. The full film Bernadette Soubirous, by Jean Delannoy.

But the job of miller is a precariousness, and the soubirous come to know misery, to the point of having to live in the old dungeon of Lourdes, disused for insalubrity. Bernadette will live several times in Bartrès, in his nurse. Until January 1858, where her father was looking for her to prepare her first communion, which she wanted intensely. But it does not have the head of the formulas or what is taught at school as well as to catechism.

On February 11, 1858, in the cold of winter, she left to collect dead wood, to sell it for bread. There, in the rock of Massabielle, on the banks of the Gave, the one who on March 25 will appear to him to entrust her name: “I am the Immaculate Conception”.

It will appear to him 18 times, between February 11 and July 16, 1858. Bernadette was 14 years old. She remained in Lourdes until 1866. She then entered Nevers, among the Sisters of Charity of Nevers that she knew in Lourdes. She remained there until her death on April 16, 1879. She was then 35 years old.