Homily for the Formal Reception of the Relics of St Bernadette

with Mass in St Mary’s Cathedral, Kilkenny

21 September 2024

Most people know little or nothing about Bernadette Soubirous except that Our Lady is believed to have appeared to her at Lourdes. We heard some of that story in Bernadette’s own words read at the beginning of this Mass. But let me say that Bernadette was not canonised because she saw visions of Mary. She was named a saint because she persevered in living the virtues of faith, hope and love, and this in spite of the way people treated her after her visions. It is what happened from this point after the visions had ended that marks Bernadette as an example for us to follow, explains why her relics are venerated and our presence at this Mass.

With simple dignity Bernadette, following the visons, did not allow herself to become inflated by her profound experience or overwhelmed by the important people who came to meet her following it. The conversion that the Blessed Mother asked for, Bernadette explained, was “first for myself and then for others”.

Her first teacher, following the visons when she went to school, gave up on her, saying she was too stupid. (The catechism, you see, was written, not in the local French dialect that Bernadette spoke, but in the French of educated people, which was unknown to her at this stage.)

Eight years after the apparitions Bernadette left the village of Lourdes to enter the convent of the Sisters of Charity at their motherhouse. Some of her religious superiors were deliberately hard on her because of her celebrity. Some were jealous, and some others loved her dearly. But Bernadette never complained.

Bernadette’s humble reaction to the jibes which inevitably came her way was, “If the Blessed Virgin could have found someone more ignorant than I, she would have chosen her.” How salutary must she have found the words of St Paul in our reading today: ‘God chose the weak of the world to shame the strong’. She accepted the lowliest tasks with the same simplicity that she showed to the high and mighty visitors who still pursued her, even to the convent. People often asked her to touch holy objects and bless rosaries.

After her profession, Bernadette was assigned to the convent infirmary since she was there so much anyway, because of periodic crises with asthma. Here she discovered a gift for caring for the sick, especially those with distressing illnesses. The doctor of the motherhouse praised her ability and marvelled that her diminutive size wasn’t a drawback. (Bernadette’s biographers estimate her adult height at about 4’7″.)

Bernadette herself wrote in a letter, “I love the poor a great deal. I love to take care of sick people.” In addition, her sense of humour served her well in the infirmary as well as in her own frequent illnesses, and absolutely delighted the younger sisters who came to her for advice.

Of the 13 years she was in the convent, her last three were spent mostly in the infirmary. Weakened by years of chronic asthma and then by a painful tubercular tumour on her knee which made it impossible to walk, she spent her time cheering up those who came to cheer her up, as well as doing needlework. She also continued to receive those persistent visitors of high station who came to meet “the visionary”.

She called her sickbed with its tent-like canopy of sheets her “white chapel” and made it a place of prayer. She united this part of her suffering to the passion of Jesus and hoped to “thank the holy Virgin right up to the end.”

In her last few days, Bernadette began to fret about the ordinariness with which she had lived out her vocation. It’s precisely this “ordinary manner” of Bernadette that gives us hope and instruction. None of us is likely to have apparitions of Our Lady, but all of us can simply be ourselves in the face of things that might puff us up with self-importance or cow us in the presence of the rich and powerful.

Today in the presence of the relics of St Bernadette let us pray for a portion of her faith, her self-effacing good humour, her humility that somehow never faltered, and that unfailing patience and perseverance with people who misjudged her. For these virtues in our own lives, we can pray, asking her intercession.  May the grain of wheat that the message of Bernadette’s plants in our hearts produce over time an abundant harvest in Ossory and throughout our country. Amen.

+ Niall Coll

Bishop of Ossory