Our Lady's Humble Broom
by Fr. Roger J. Landry - February 15, 2008
We focused last week on the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the apparitions of Our Lady in Lourdes, France, which the Church celebrated on February 11. We considered the continuing relevance of what Our Lady revealed and, like any "private revelation," how it is meant to help us better to understand and live the Gospel in our day.
Today I would like to turn our attention to the other major figure in Lourdes, St. Bernadette Soubirous, the 75th anniversary of whose canonization we mark this year. In most parts of the world, including the United States, the Church celebrates her feast on the day she died, April 16. But in France, they solemnly commemorate her birth into eternal life on February 18, within the octave of the feast day of Our Lady of Lourdes and the day on which Mary, speaking to Bernadette for the first time, told her that she did not promise to make her happy in this world but in the next. This is a fitting enough reason, I'd say, to celebrate her eternal happiness on this day!
For me, her February 18 celebration will always have special significance because on this day four years ago, I had the privilege to celebrate Mass at the outdoor altar in the Grotto where Mary appeared to her. I was on pilgrimage to the Marian shrines of Portugal, Spain and France with parishioners from Espirito Santo in Fall River and St. Francis Xavier in Hyannis. Upon our arrival in Lourdes on February 17, I stopped by the sanctuary office to confirm the times of our Masses during the next two days. The attendant informed me that they needed a priest to celebrate the English Mass at the grotto the following morning and asked if I were willing. My response was simple: "Mais oui!" The attendant then added that I would be celebrating the Feast of St. Bernadette in the very place she had received the apparitions of our Lady. I didn't know what to say, in either French or English…
I'll never forget the Mass. The temperature was just above freezing and there was a steady rain. The cold was so biting that by the time of consecration I was not able to feel the host in my fingertips. As I looked out at the crowd of my pilgrims and hordes of others receiving a chilling celestial shower, it was one of the few times in my priesthood that I seriously considered not preaching a homily. I asked the lector, one of my fellow pilgrims and the only other person in the sanctuary, for her advice. "Father," she replied, "this is the only time most of us will ever be here, and we're here by God's providence on a great feast day. Don't worry about the cold and the rain. We're not!" So I took her advice and preached on St. Bernadette's humility and how the words Mary said about herself in the Magnificat — "The Lord has looked upon the lowliness of his handmaid; from this day all generations will call me blessed" (Lk 1:48) — could equally be applied to Mademoiselle Soubirous.
She was born in 1844 to a poor, struggling miller and a cleaning woman. When she was ten months old, her mother accidentally fell into the fireplace, burning her breasts so badly that she could no longer nurse her first-born child. Without options, her parents sent her to be nursed outside of town by a woman who had just buried her infant son. Bernadette returned only three years later. By that point, her family had hit such rough times that they had had to move to a damp one-room cellar in what used to be a jail. There she contracted cholera and began her lifelong struggle with asthma. When she was 11, the family could no longer manage to feed her and her younger siblings, so she was sent to live with her godmother and help her run a café. That didn't work out too well, so she was sent to live with the foster mother who had nursed her as an infant, to serve as a shepherdess and a maid. She returned home only three weeks before the apparitions began, to discover that in the interim her dad had been imprisoned under suspicion of having stolen flour.
Throughout all these years, her family had focused more on mere survival than on their children's education. Bernadette was illiterate. She was considered so dull and incapable of learning even the most elemental lessons of the Catechism, that she had not made her first Communion. When Mary finally revealed her name to her, "I am the Immaculate Conception," the unfamiliar words were so big that Bernadette needed to repeat them continuously on the way to her parish priest lest she forget them.
Once the apparitions began, she had many other opportunities to grow in humility. She had to suffer through the incredulity of her family and put up with a seemingly unending series of often belligent interrogations by civil or church leaders, doctors, and skeptics. Pilgrims and onlookers would mob her, try to cut off pieces of her clothing, and take her rosary, scapular and anything else they could grab as keepsakes. As much as these things frustrated her, she bore these indignities with patience, politeness, and serenity. Once the authenticity of the apparitions was affirmed, she went to live at the hospice of the Sisters of Charity and Christian Instruction, in order to try to escape the press of the crowds. There she discerned a vocation to the Sisters of Notre Dame de Nevers and humbly moved far away from the city she had helped to put on the map.
In Nevers, she united herself in a hidden way to the celebration of the Mass by embroidering altar cloths and vestments until asthma claimed her life at the age of 35. Before she died, she likened herself to a broom. "Our Lady used me," she said. "They have put me back in my corner. I am happy there and stop there."
Now this humble, sweet, good girl dwells happily in the broom closet of the heavenly mansion.
Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.
