Appearances of the Virgin Mary before the French peasant girl Bernadette Soubirous represented the most famous Marian apparitions in the modern world. The events sparked sacred and secular controversies. Bernadette became the first saint to be widely photographed, and her story later became the subject of films and popular songs.
On February 11, 1858, Bernadette Soubirous, a barely literate peasant girl living in the town of Lourdes in the Pyrenees, saw a vision of a young girl about her own age, fourteen, whom she perceived as divine. Soubirous suffered from asthma and had paused to rest in a wooded area where the poor often went to collect free wood. She later reported that she felt a breeze and looked in its direction, and there she saw the illuminated girl along the banks of the Gave de Pau, adjacent to Massabieille, a local religious shrine. Over the next five months, Soubirous experienced a total of eighteen visions of the Virgin Mary, whom she first called Aquero, or heavenly, for lack of a better name. On her third appearance, the Virgin asked Soubirous to return to the site for fifteen days. She was accompanied by various people from Lourdes, members of her own family, and eventually pilgrims, none of whom saw anything but Soubirous appearing to talk to an invisible person.
Soon, local clerics and the police grew concerned that the accumulation of people could become dangerous, and they questioned the authenticity of Soubirous’s story. She withstood the harsh questioning of Police Commissioner Dominique Jacomet, who threatened her with imprisonment if she did not withdraw her story and stop going to the site. Her parish priest, Dominique Peyramale,
Between February 11 and 25, the Virgin revealed her desire to have a shrine built on the riverbank site that would become the Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes. On February 25, to the embarrassment of her family, Soubirous was seen to claw the ground and to drink the water that her digging uncovered. One week later, eight hundred people came to the location of the fountain, and some even claimed that the water had healed the sick. Then, Soubirous told Peyramale that the Virgin asked that a chapel be built to enclose the fountain and that a pilgrimage be organized to consecrate the site.
Initially, despite the claims of healing, there was no evidence of the miraculous cures that would later characterize the shrine. To test her again, Peyramale
The most controversial moment of the apparitions occurred on March 25, 1858, when Soubirous pressed the Virgin to identify herself so that all would know she was from heaven. She replied, “I am the Immaculate Conception.”
Late nineteenth century Currier & Ives print of pilgrims visiting the shrine erected at Lourdes after Bernadette Soubirous claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary there.
The departure of the Virgin was almost as controversial as her first appearance. Soubirous, whose family feared alternately for her sanity and her safety, became a charity student at the convent and hospital of the Sisters of Nevers in 1860 at the age of eighteen. Eventually, she would become a nun in that order, and because she was poorly educated, she performed manual labor in the hospital for many years, working as the equivalent of an orderly. By October, 1875, Soubirous, who took the name Sister Marie-Bernard, was bedridden, her body consumed with tubercular
In 1862, the Roman Catholic Church determined that the Lourdes apparitions
In 1872, the Assumptionist Fathers organized the first national pilgrimage to Lourdes. Also in the 1870’s, the importance of the shrine shifted from one associated with messages from the Virgin Mary to a place where miraculous cures occurred. People who were cured at Lourdes came under medical scrutiny, as doctors tried to determine if these so-called faith cures (a term coined in 1892 by Jean Martin Chacot
Locally, the apparitions at Lourdes transformed a poor rural town in the Pyrenees into a place of international significance to persons of all faiths. Because of their uniqueness, the apparitions caused Soubirous and eventually the citizens of Lourdes to defy parental, familial, civil, legal, clerical, literary, and cultural authorities. Moreover, because the Virgin, Soubirous, and most of the pilgrims to the shrine were women, the apparitions and their aftermath increased the public prominence of women in a traditional French society in which men usually controlled the public sphere.
With Soubirous’s story romanticized in 1869 by Lasserre
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Harris, Ruth. Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age. New York: Viking Press, 1999. A social and cultural history of Lourdes with an emphasis on the critical reception of Soubirous’s apparitions. -
Lasserre, Henri. Our Lady of Lourdes. New York: P. J. Kenedy, 1906. English translation of the French text that spread Soubirous’s story throughout first France then the world. -
Ravier, Andre. Bernadette. London: Collins, 1978. An illustrated life of the woman who became Saint Bernadette of Lourdes; includes a helpful chronology of the apparitions. -
Szabo, Jason. “Seeing Is Believing? The Form and Substance of French Medical Debates over Lourdes.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 76 (2002): 199-230. Discusses how the “faith cure” challenged and disturbed the Parisian medical community during the nineteenth century. -
Taylor, Therese. Bernadette of Lourdes: Her Life, Death, and Visions. London: Burns and Oates, 2003. Follows the life of Soubirous, with an emphasis on how the apparitions altered her life. -
_______.“’So Many Extraordinary Things to Tell’: Letters from Lourdes, 1858.” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 46, no. 3 (July, 1995): 457-481. Analyzes letters by Adelaide Monlaur written between March 8, 1858, and April 9, 1859, to her cousin, giving her firsthand accounts of her reactions to the visions as a citizen of Lourdes.
Pius IX Decrees the Immaculate Conception Dogma
Vatican I Decrees Papal Infallibility Dogma
Émile Zola.