This Friday we celebrate the Feast of St. Bernadette Soubirous. She was the humble, peasant girl, on whom was bestowed one of the greatest of earthly blessings...to be visited and spoken to by Our Blessed Mother, Mary. It is a remarkable story that sadly, even many Catholics, are not familiar with.
Perhaps no other appearance of the Blessed Virgin Mary has captured people’s hearts and imaginations like those she made to Bernadette Soubirous in Lourdes, France in 1858. Our Lady appeared eighteen times that year to an impoverished, uneducated fourteen-year-old girl who lived with her family in an old jail. Since that time, more than five thousand healings are reported to have taken place in the spot where the Blessed Mother appeared; sixty-four of them the Catholic Church has proclaimed “miraculous.”
Everything about the young girl named Bernadette Soubirous spoke of humility. If anyone had told her struggling parents how widely her name would become known, they never would have believed it. Yet it was this simple, virtually uneducated girl who had been chosen to receive the highest of privileges.
Bishop Jacques Benoit-Gonin of the Diocese of Beauvais in France has announced the official recognition of the 70th miracles that took place in Lourdes which involved the miraculous healing of a paralyzed nun.
Through the grace of God, we recently completed our first Women of Grace® Pilgrimage and I must tell you it was a beautiful and blessed time in the Lord! As a matter of fact, we have made the pilgrimage available to you through my Facebook page. So if you are a "friend" on my personal page, I invite you to go on it and watch the videos. If you scroll all the way down to the first video, either from March 6th or 7th, you can watch all the videos in succession and through our final day on March 13 in Lourdes, France.
