Bernadette Soubirous
Saint Bernadette Soubirous is the patroness of the sick and of Lourdes because of the eighteen apparitions of the Virgin Mary she received at the grotto of Massabielle in 1858; the spring the Lady bade her uncover became the most famous place of healing in the Christian world, and Bernadette is forever bound to the pilgrims who go there seeking a cure. She is the patroness of the sick also from her own frail life — asthmatic and tubercular from childhood, she suffered greatly and died at thirty-five — and the patroness of the poor, of shepherdesses, and of those mocked as simple, because she was all of these: a poor, asthmatic shepherd-girl whom the authorities doubted, yet who held fast to what she had seen.
Saint Bernadette Soubirous was a young French girl to whom the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared eighteen times at the grotto of Massabielle in Lourdes in 1858. Born in poverty in 1844, she was sickly and uneducated, yet the Marian apparitions she reported led to Lourdes becoming the most visited Marian shrine in the world. She later became a nun and died at age thirty-five.
