OUR LADY OF LOURDES’ FEAST DAY IS FEB. 11
St. Bernadette
By Susan Brinkmann
CS&T Correspondent
This is the Bernadette few have ever seen. Hidden behind the walls of a convent in Nevers, France, the real Bernadette Soubirous, known as Sister Marie-Bernard, was a humble, deeply spiritual nun who wanted only to escape her notoriety and suffer in peace for the God she loved.
Thanks to the painstaking work of a Drury University scholar, Patricia A. McEachern, the private notes and letters of Saint Bernadette have been translated and published for the first time in English by Ignatius Press.
“I tried so hard to capture her voice,” McEachern said about the long and painstaking process of translating Bernadette’s writing. “Every morning before I started working, I would make a cross on my forehead with a little holy water from Lourdes, then ask Our Lady and Bernadette to help me be faithful to precisely what Bernadette said.”
The book contains a wide selection of personal letters, diary excerpts and spiritual notes kept by the saint in the years following the apparitions and leading up to her death in 1879.
McEachern intersperses the letters with just enough biographical information to give the reader a feel for what was going on in Bernadette’s life during the time of her writing. The effect is to bring out facets of Bernadette’s personality few have ever seen.
This was a saint who was madly in love with Jesus. “Nothing has any value for me but Jesus,” she wrote in her private notebook in 1873. “No place, no thing, no person, no idea, no feeling, no honor, no suffering, nothing that can turn me away from Jesus. For me, Jesus himself is my honor, my delight, my heart, my spirit, He whom I love, what I love, my home, Heaven here on earth. Jesus is my treasure and my love and Jesus crucified is my only happiness.”
And yet, she was humble enough to admit to a man who wrote to her of his devotion to Lourdes in 1862: “Monsieur, I am weak. Pray that I will not misuse the great favor I have received from Heaven.”
However, she was not too pious to resist scolding a sibling from time to time. “I hope you will be a little nicer the next time you write,” she told her brother, Jean-Marie, who didn’t write for several years after leaving the priesthood and getting married.
Although she left Lourdes in 1867, her heart remained in the grotto where she saw the Virgin 18 times between February and July in 1858.
“The grotto is where you will find me in spirit, clinging to the foot of the rock I love so much,” she wrote to the Sisters at the Hospice in Lourdes in July, 1866.
Perhaps the most startling revelation of all is the wisdom that is revealed in the private notes of the girl who was described as “incapable of learning” by the catechist who prepared her for first Communion. St. Bernadette’s private papers contained snippets from a variety of spiritual writers as well as retreat notes and other insights. “She must have been very intelligent to put this notebook together, to understand these thoughts,” McEachern said.
That St. Bernadette recorded such spiritual insights in French, which was not her native language, is even more surprising, McEachern said.
“Bernadette’s native language was not French, but a patois — a combination of Spanish and French. Our Lady spoke to her in patois,” McEachern said. “I was astonished that she could go from a 14-year-old who could not read or write French to someone who could record such an appreciation for great spiritual writers. …
“I think she was very capable of learning. She just didn’t have the opportunity,” McEachern said. “Even when she was in the convent learning, they’d take her out of class so she could go downstairs and talk to pilgrims. She was constantly in-and-out of class.”
McEachern did find misspellings in the original writings, some of which now seem to have been prophetic. “One of the most interesting misspellings that I discovered is, she said that if you put Jesus first, He’ll give you everything else. What she wanted to say next was ‘in abundance.’ If you spell the word with a ‘t’ it means abundance — but with an ‘x,’ as she did, it means ‘on the cross.’”
That mistake underscores what is, perhaps, the most inspiring part of the story of Saint Bernadette — the courage with which she endured a life riddled with physical suffering. Stricken with asthma as a child, she contracted cholera at age 11, which left her growth permanently stunted: She remained 4-foot-7 inches tall.
She died at 35, after years of suffering from tuberculosis of the bone and lungs.
Hers was a very human struggle with illness, punctuated by moments when she seemed to be trying to pull herself out of the jaws of despair: “May the crucifix not be just something I wear, something I look at, but let it be alive in my heart.”
In another entry, she talks herself into being resolute: “I am so exhausted in the morning. Remind myself of the temptation Father Avila experienced one day when he was on his way to celebrate Mass. He hesitated because he was so weary. Our Lord appeared to him … reminding him that weariness had not prevented Him from going all the way to Calvary. Courage! I must learn how to persevere also.”
She sometimes used humor to keep her spirits up, referring to her bed in the infirmary as her “white chapel” and to being sick as her “job.”
But the depths of her love for God, and her willingness to suffer all for Him, shines through her writing. At one point, after spending months in bed, so ill she had to be carried by two nuns to Sunday Mass, she wrote to a fellow religious, “I am happier with my Christ than a queen on her throne.”
Her life ended painfully on April 16, 1879, just after she pleaded to a sister, “Pray for me, pray for me.”
McEachern admits to being powerfully affected by the work. Raised without any particular religion, she saw the movie, “Song of Bernadette,” as a child and never forgot it.
“I always believed that I was born a Catholic,” McEachern said, “I just wasn’t raised as one.”
Years later, while visiting Lourdes and Rue de Bac on a combination business trip and pilgrimage, she decided to become Catholic. She considered only one name for her confirmation. “Bernadette was the only name I could take. She had been there with me all along.”
While attending a conference in Steubenville, Ohio, McEachern learned about the existence of Bernadette’s private notes and correspondence, which had never been translated into English.
“I was awestruck,” McEachern said. “I could not believe they hadn’t been translated yet. I felt compelled. It was like someone handing me an enormous gift.”
And now, thanks to her generous work, this gift belongs to us all.
Contact Susan Brinkmann at fiat723@aol.com or (215) 965-4615