More timeout from the ‘heresy wars’ to reflect on a saint who was most extraordinary even in her humble beginnings as the least of the least…
‘Impossible not to love Bernadette’
A tribute from Vittorio Messori, as a rib
from the saint’s incorrupt body tours Italy
by Costanza Signorelli
Translated from
May 8, 2019
A few days ago, a relic of St. Bernadette Soubirous arrived in Orio al Serio, in the province of Bergamo, northern Italy, to begin a ‘tour’ of 34 dioceses in Italy. What does this extraordinary saint have to tell us today? We asked Vittorio Messori, who emerged from his self-imposed silence on commenting on Church affairs, because, he says, the message of Our Lady at Lourdes is more urgent than ever.
“Bernadette embodies the most radical realization of the Gospel. If she were here today, she would ask us all to look to Our Lady and her fervent desire to save souls”.
Bernadette Soubirous was, for Our Lady, like a heavenly space without borders and obstacles, he says – ‘Mary’s chosen piece of heaven on earth,’ within whom she could move in total freedom towards achieving salvation for souls and the whole world. Perhaps that was why Our Lady felt very much ‘at home’ with the little saint of Lourdes.
“If one gets to know who Bernadette is, it is impossible not to be enamored of her and not to think of Paradise,” Messori says with certainty, having written what is possibly the most comprehensive book yet on the 18 Marian apparitions at Lourdes and on the girl she appeared to [
Bernadette non ci ha ingannati] (Bernadette did not deceive us), published in 2011]. By his own admission, Messori is one of the most fervent devotees of the Marian shrine in Lourdes as well as “the little unlettered girl on whose shoulders rested the truth of this supernatural event”.
That is why we asked to talk to him about this extraordinary saint on the occasion of the Italian visit of a primary relic – a rib taken from her incorrupt body.
[Wikipedia tells us the account of the doctor who performed the third and last exhumation of Bernadette’s body in 1925:
"I would have liked to open the left side of the thorax to take the ribs as relics and then remove the heart which I am certain must have survived intact. However, as the trunk was slightly supported on the left arm, it would have been rather difficult to try and get at the heart without doing too much noticeable damage. As the Mother Superior had expressed a desire for the Saint's heart to be kept together with the whole body, and as Monsignor the Bishop did not insist, I gave up the idea of opening the left-hand side of the thorax and contented myself with removing the two right ribs which were more accessible. ...
What struck me during this examination, of course, was the state of perfect preservation of the skeleton, the fibrous tissues of the muscles (still supple and firm), of the ligaments, and of the skin, and above all the totally unexpected state of the liver after 46 years. One would have thought that this organ, which is basically soft and inclined to crumble, would have decomposed very rapidly or would have hardened to a chalky consistency. Yet, when it was cut it was soft and almost normal in consistency. I pointed this out to those present, remarking that this did not seem to be a natural phenomenon."
What do you think Bernadette would say to us today?
I will answer with an anecdote. When Bernadette first arrived, late at night, in the convent in Nevers where she would be cloistered to the end of her days, she lifted her eyes to heaven and said: “I have come here to hide myself. The Holy Virgin made me an instrument of her wishes and has now placed me in my proper place. I am very happy for this”. One day, after she had been cloistered for so many years, it was proposed that she revisit her beloved Lourdes once more, but she replied: “I will never go back there. I am not important. The Lady is, and I would not want to be a distraction from her, not even for a day. My place is here, not among a crowd”. Therefore, I do not know if she would be happy that a part of her incorrupt body is making a tour. But of course, she would be very happy if the occasion would serve to draw all possible attention to Our Lady and her messages. Her dearest wish was simply to ‘disappear’.
Can we say that her desire for complete obscurity was one of the great signs of her sanctity?
Her desire for obscurity was without a doubt one of the principal characteristics of her holiness. She always said she was only an instrument chosen by Our Lady for her purposes, but one who was to remain hidden afterwards. Yet she did not understand why Our Lady chose someone like her.
Once she had told the world what Mary asked her to say, she would have wanted never to speak again. In fact, in Nevers, she requested that the subject of Lourdes should never be brought up with her. So the day after she arrived, the Mother Superior called all the sisters of Nevers and neighboring towns to a meeting at which Bernadette spoke to them of her experience in Lourdes, after which everyone obliged themselves to total silence about what they heard. However, the convent was besieged with requests to see her, but Bernadette, obliged by her superiors, only received visits by bishops. But to all their questions, all she did was to reiterate:
“Stay with the things that I related right after each apparition”. And she stuck to her desire for obscurity to the day she died.
Whoever visits the church in the convent of Nevers will not immediately see Bernadette’s remains. One must look to find her incorrupt body in a side altar. She had said before she died, “If you really wish me to be buried in the church, then place me somewhere hidden”. I do not think she would be happy with the luxurious casket in which she lies.
Now we come to the message of Lourdes. The first thing Our Lady said to Bernadette was “I do not promise to make yu happy in this world, only in the next”…
And that is what happened. Bernadette lived her whole life in physical pain. She died when she was 35, after great sufferings, which she never lamented. She did not seek the pain – she certainly was no masochist – but she always accepted and welcomed it. One time during her final days, since she could only breathe with great effort, she said, “I would be so happy if someone opened my chest so I could breathe better”, but she quickly expressed repentance for what she considered a lament. And one day, when she was brought to the infirmary for the nth time, she said, “My occupation is to be sick”. Bernadette lived within the dimensions of true faith: she accepted always and willingly everything that Heaven sent her, never asking or anything else, not more and not less.
Getting back to the apparitions: Our Lady spoke of eternal life – ‘the other world’ - as a promise of happiness…
One day, one of her fellow nuns said to Bernadette: “You are suffering greatly, but you have the certainty that you will go to Paradise because the Blessed Virgin promised it to you”. Bernadette, who knew that she could at times be rather severe, answered drily,
“Paradise? I shall go there only if I deserve it”, not being sure at all that she would merit it. This is to illustrate the awareness of eternal life that Bernadette had during her days on earth.
Many times Lourdes is considered as a place for physical healing, but Our Lady never spoke about phyically ill persons nor of bodily ailments….
She came to help us heal in our spirit. Lourdes is not a clinic for the body, it’s a clinic for the spirit. Bernadette herself never asked for physical healing, but incessantly prayed for spiritual healing. Let us be clear about this:
the physical healings granted by Heaven are precious, beyond value – they are the material proof of the truth of the Marian apparitions. Lourdes is the only shrine in the world which has its own medical office which records and investigates all reported miracles. Yet it must be underscored that
in her 18 apparitions. Our Lady spoke of sin, of penance and reparation for spiritual evil, but never of physical illness and healing. Which is why what became of Bernadette’s body after her death is most interesting.
What happened?
When she died in 1979, at age 35, her body had been so consumed, virtually rotten by the illnesses that devastated her, that she looked 70, the sisters said. Well, not only did death fail to decompose her body, but it was transformed to be young and beautiful. The old nuns who had lived with her during her last days and were present at the [first] exhumation of the body
[in 1909; it would be exhumed again in 1919 and in 1925, when her face and hands were covered with wax masks for protection] were stupefied to see with their own eyes how she had been transformed. Two of them fainted and collapsed in shock.
Turning back to what Our Lady said during her apparitions. On Wednesday, February 24, 1858, she said, “Penance, penance, penance. Pray for the conversion of sinners”. What did ‘doing penance’ mean for Bernadette?
Papa Bergoglio has said many times that he wants the church to be like a field hospital. Well, Lourdes is exactly that, a hospital – but let us not forget – one that is primarily intended for spiritual healing Our Lady of Lourdes came to help us with our spiritual wellbeing, to heal our soul. So the penance that she invoked three times reminds us of this: We must pray a lot, we must keep away resolutely from sin, and we must safeguard what is good in our soul.
Today, there is the dangerous tendency to think of the church as a horizontal reality, instead of a vertical one. They would reduce the church to an NGO, an organization committed to ‘cure’ the material deficiencies of the world. Well, Our Lady at Lourdes reminded us that the principal mission of the Church is to lead us to eternal life. Work sof material charity are necessary and priceless, but only if they are a consequence of our faith.
One last question: Among all the Marian apparitions, why are Lourdes and St. Bernadette so special to your heart?
I was born on April 16, which is Bernadett’es birthday in heaven. It is also the birthday of Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI, and we always told each other how we rejoice that we were born on the feast day of the saint of Lourdes. But anecdotes apart, what has always attracted me to Lourdes is the evidence that it imposes on us: the plans of God are not those of men. When we wish to announce something that is truly important, we choose the most important, the best known, the most titled person we can think of. But when Mary wished to speak to us, to mankind, she chose someone who was truly the least of the least. No one could have been more ignorant, more sickly, more insignificant, more ignored, less appreciated and more an object of suspicion than she was: her father had been accused of robbery, her mother was known as a drunkard. She herself told Our Lady: “If you had meant to choose the most ignorant and stupid girl on earth, you did”. To know Bernadette, it is impossible not to love her – the Gospel in its pure state lived in her. That is why every night, I pray to her to intercede for all of us.
A tribute from Benedict XVI
On his 85th birthday, on April 16, 2012, Benedict XVI celebrated Mass at the Pauline Chapel of the Apostolic Palace, in which he paid this tribute to St. Bernadette, in one of his trademark extemporaneous homilies:
On the day of my birth and of my Baptism, 16 April, the Church’s liturgy set three signposts which show me where the road leads and help me to find it. In the first place, it is the Memorial of St Bernadette Soubirous, the seer of Lourdes; then there is one of the most unusual Saints in the Church’s history, Benedict Joseph Labre; and then, above all, this day is immersed in the Paschal Mystery, in the Mystery of the Cross and the Resurrection. In the year of my birth, this was expressed in a special way: it was Holy Saturday, the day of the silence of God, of his apparent absence, of God’s death, but also the day on which the Resurrection was proclaimed.
We all know and love Bernadette Soubirous, the simple girl from the south, from the Pyrenees. Bernadette grew up in the France of the 18th-century Enlightenment in a poverty which it is hard to imagine. The prison that had been evacuated because it was too insanitary, became — after some hesitation — the family home in which she spent her childhood. There was no access to education, only some catechism in preparation for First Communion. Yet this simple girl, who retained a pure and honest heart, had a heart that saw, that was able to see the Mother of the Lord, and the Lord’s beauty and goodness was reflected in her. Mary was able to appear to this girl and through her to speak to the people of the time and beyond it.
Bernadette could see with her pure and genuine heart. And Mary pointed out the spring to her: she was able to discover the spring of pure and uncontaminated living water; water that is life, water that gives purity and health. And down the centuries, this living water has become a sign from Mary, a sign that shows where the sources of life are found, where we can purify ourselves, where we can find what is uncontaminated. This sign is all the more important in our time, in which we see the world so anxious, and in which the need for water, pure water, becomes pressing. From Mary, the Mother of the Lord, from her pure heart, pure and genuine life-giving water also wells: water which in this century — and in centuries to come — purifies and heals us.
I think we can consider this water as an image of truth that comes to us in faith: not simulated but rather uncontaminated truth. Indeed to be able to live, to be able to be pure, we need to have within us a longing for pure life, for undistorted truth, for what is not contaminated by corruption, a longing to be unblemished.
So on this day, this little Saint has always been a sign for me, who has shown me where the living water we need comes from — the water that purifies us and gives life — and a sign of how we ought to be: with all our knowledge and all our skills, although they are necessary, we must not lose our simple hearts, the simple gaze of the heart that can perceive the essential, and we must always pray the Lord to preserve in us the humility that enables the heart to remain clairvoyant — to see what is simple and essential, the beauty and goodness of God — and in this way to find the spring from which flows the purifying life-giving water…
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 10/05/2019 20:16]