This month, the relics of St Bernadette, the visionary of Lourdes, are being taken around England, Scotland and Wales in a special portable reliquary. The staging posts on the tour are interestingly diverse, from Westminster Cathedral to St Winefride’s Well at Holywell in Wales, the Lourdes Grotto in Motherwell, Wormwood Scrubs prison and the Ukrainian cathedral in Mayfair. Many thousands of people have travelled from Britain to Lourdes; now the relics of St Bernadette are travelling here.
St Bernadette was only a girl of 14 when she saw “a little lady” apparently not much older than she was, in the woods near her home. In that sense the definitive image of Our Lady of Lourdes as a mature woman does not quite do justice to the original vision. And we should remember that St Bernadette was not just young, but a peasant from a poor family, when she saw the Virgin in a series of visions over five months in 1858. She simply did not understand the words that the vision spoke to her in the local dialect: “I am the Immaculate Conception”, a dogma only definitively accepted by the Church a few years before. And the expression of that dogma as a result of Bernadette’s vision was very practical. The Virgin who described herself as the Immaculate Conception also instructed Bernadette to scratch in the earth to find a spring. That spring produced waters which still heal the sick in body and mind.
