Happy Feast Day

SAINT BERNADETTE!!! Political activists should all take Bernadette Soubirous as their Patron Saint- she is one of my favorite. Openness to new ideas or ways of thinking often come with resistance and this was certainly the case for Bernadette Soubirous of Lourdes, France. Imagine you know you see something that is actually in the form of a beautiful woman who is talking to you. Imagine she tells you to go dig in the dirt and wash your face with it and there is nothing there but dirt. So while a whole crowd of people are looking at you, you go dig frantically in the dirt and dig a little deeper into some mysterious moisture and rub your face with mud. Everyone watching thought she was crazy. Until a gushing spring of living waters flowed out of the little hole she dug and a mountain spring was discovered that has cured incurable diseases was revealed. OMG! Yeah, really. OMG. That's what happened to a destitute asthmatic young teenager in a mountain village in France in the middle of the 19th Century. Not only did they think she was crazy- they sent the police after her to harass her into silence, locked up and around the location where she was seeing this vision of supreme loveliness and demanded she shut up or be locked up. She should be the Patron Saint of Code Pink. I Love Her. Her family was so destitute they lived-the entire family in a one room hovel that doubled as a prison cell when they weren't in it-their father barely got odd job work after a work injury in a mill left him near blind. The water -mud mixture, like the biblical story also cured his blindness-but, shhhh, don't tell anyone or the whole world will want to go visit the town. Which is exactly what happened. Here is an official account of her life: Saint Bernadette Soubirous, who was born in Lourdes, France on January 7, 1844, almost lived in a padded cell and did live in a jail cell…That’s right! Due to hard times for the Subirous family, Bernadette spent her youth in a single-room basement-level home that formerly housed prisoners, known as “the dungeon”. And the padded cell? Well, that was nearly the result of her fascinating story. From February 11 to July 16, 1858, 14 year-old Bernadette experienced 18 visions of “a beautiful Lady” in a local grotto and by the time of her final apparition, as many as 20,000 people had traveled to witness the events. During one vision, the Lady asked Bernadette to drink from a spring in the ground, only there was no spring. So, a confused Bernadette used her bare hands to dig up the ground before finally splashing some damp mud to her mouth. This prompted many locals, who could not see the Lady, to claim Bernadette had gone insane, but within days, a powerful spring began to flow from the muddy hole and reports of miraculous healings soon followed. Further vindicating the visions, the Lady revealed her name to Bernadette as “The Immaculate Conception”: an 1854 dogma defined by Pope Pius IX, and a phrase that Bernadette had never even heard before. To escape her new found and undesired fame, 22-year old Bernadette left Lourdes to join the Sisters of Charity convent in Nevers, but upon her arrival, even the mistress of novices complained: “If the Blessed Virgin wanted to appear on Earth, why would she choose a coarse and uneducated peasant, rather than a learned and virtuous religious?” Bernadette spent the rest of her life there, working primarily as an infirmary assistant. But after years of difficult health issues, including asthma, Bernadette died from tuberculosis in 1879 at only 35 years old. Amazingly, Bernadette then joined a small group of saints, known as The Incorruptibles, whose bodies have refused to decompose after death. St. Bernadette’s visions in Lourdes have inspired dozens of books, and four major motion pictures…including 1943′s Oscar-winning film, Song of Bernadette. Today, in France, only Paris has more hotels than Lourdes, and more than 5 million pilgrims seeking healing and renewed faith visit the small town every year…To-date, 67 people have experienced cures that the Lourdes Medical Bureau has classified as inexplicable. But, St. Bernadette herself said that only faith and prayer can cure, which is probably why she was named the patron saint of the sick. Bernadette was beatified in 1925, then canonized by Pope Pius XI in 1933…and while the Vatican declared the apparitions of Our Lady of Lourdes “worthy of belief”, Bernadette’s canonization was not founded on the visions, but rather on the holiness she exhibited in her life. …and that’s how a shy, young French girl became the saint we know today.