Fr Billy Swan
Here in the diocese of Ferns this week, the relics of St Bernadette Soubirous will visit St Aidan’s Cathedral in Enniscorthy where they will be venerated by thousands of the faithful. Many of these people have already been to Lourdes as part of the diocesan pilgrimage that has departed every year for more than fifty years. For others who have never been to Lourdes, it is an opportunity to know more about the story of St Bernadette and how she is truly a prophet of prayer and faith in these times.
Bernadette Soubirous was born on 7th January 1844 in southern France and was baptised the following day in the parish Church at Lourdes. She was born into a poor family and was illiterate until later in life. She was no stranger to tragedy and loss . Out of six brothers and two sisters, only three lived beyond the age of ten.
On 11th February 1858, the young Bernadette who was aged 14 at the time, was out gathering firewood at a remote place near her home beside the River Gave. It was known as a place where rubbish was dumped by the local villagers. On that day as she prayed, she experienced a vision that she later described as ‘a dazzling light and a white figure’. This was to be the first of eighteen such visions and encounters with a person she described as ‘a small young lady’. It was only on the seventeenth occasion of her appearing did the young lady identify herself when she spoke to Bernadette ‘I am the Immaculate Conception’.
The dogma of the Immaculate Conception was declared by Pope Pius IX in 1854, only a few years beforehand. Given Bernadette’s poor background and limited education, there was little chance that she knew this. After investigation, the Church authorities confirmed the authenticity of the apparitions in 1862, seventeen years before Bernadette died in 1879. Some time after the apparitions, Bernadette sought greater solitude and time for prayer with the Sisters of Charity at Nevers where she would stay for the rest of her life. On 29th July 1866 she made her first profession as a religious sister. Bernadette died at Nevers aged 35 on 16th April 1879. Thirty years after her death, her body was exhumed and was shown to be almost totally incorrupt. She was declared blessed by Pope Pius XI in June 1921 and was canonized by the same pope on 8th December 1933, the feast of the Immaculate Conception.
Long before, Lourdes had become a place of pilgrimage for people, especially for the sick. It was a place of prayer and of healing for the many people who came there and who continue to arrive in their thousands each year seeking wholeness and peace. Despite the appeal of Lourdes water as a symbol of this healing and cleansing, Bernadette herself was keen to emphasize that it was faith and prayer that cured the sick. She said: ‘One must have faith and pray; the water will have no virtue without faith’.
As her relics tour Ireland in these months and come to our diocese this week, this remains her message to us, namely that through prayer and faith in God’s power of healing, many great things can happen. And it is in this spirit of expectant faith that we venerate the relics, praying not just for ourselves but for others who are in need of healing today. I am in need to healing, you are in need of healing, we are in need of healing, our families are in need of healing, our Church is in need of healing, our world is in need of healing too. This is the work for which Christ came, to ‘restore and unite all things in him’ in the words of St Paul (Eph. 1:10).
In the words of Bishop Ger in his recent pastoral letter: ‘Venerating the holy relics of St. Bernadette will give us the opportunity to offer our praise to God for the wonderful things he achieved in her life by allowing her to witness the apparitions of Our Lady. It will also give us the opportunity to present our petitions, bringing our needs and intentions to God through her intercession and the intercession of Our Blessed Mother’.
We pray that this gift of healing may be joyfully welcomed by all of us during this historical visit of the relics of a special saint.
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