On 11 February 1858, Bernadette Soubirous, then 14, said she saw a woman dressed in white at the limestone Grotto of Massabielle near Lourdes, France.
She reported 18 encounters between 11 February and 16 July 1858. The woman instructed her to return to the grotto, pray and drink water from its spring. In the 16th vision, on 25 March 1858, the woman said, ‘I am the Immaculate Conception.’
The words echoed a recent declaration of the Church. Pope Pius IX had made the Immaculate Conception official dogma in 1854, four years before Bernadette’s visions. After the Lourdes Commission investigated the reports from 1858–62, local bishops found the apparitions to be divine intervention. Pius approved veneration at Lourdes in 1870 and granted a canonical coronation to the basilica’s image in 1876.
Bernadette was born in Lourdes on 7 January 1844, the daughter of François Soubirous, a miller, and Louise Soubirous, a laundress. She entered the Sisters of Charity at the convent at St Gildard in Nevers on 29 July 1866. Her incorrupt body is now displayed in a glass casket in the chapel there. She died on 16 April 1879, aged 35, partly due to tuberculosis, and was canonized in 1933.
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Her physical remains are now travelling across the United States. Cardinal Robert W. McElroy received the reliquary at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C., on 18 September 2026, launching a yearlong US tour.
About 1,500 people came to the midday Mass. Throughout the opening day, people queued for up to an hour in lines that remained several hundred deep to reach the glass-enclosed reliquary. Visitors were also able to wash their hands in water from Lourdes and handle rocks from the Grotto of Massabielle.
The 24-karat gold-plated reliquary weighs 132 pounds. It holds fragments of Bernadette’s fifth and sixth ribs and kneecaps, along with strands of hair, muscle from her right femur and pieces of skin.
The Journey of Grace is scheduled to visit 140 locations, including cathedrals, basilicas, shrines, seminaries, Catholic universities, hospitals and parishes around the United States. Holy Cross Father Jim Phalan, the English-speaking chaplain at the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes in France, is travelling with the relics.
The journey brings a longstanding Catholic observance into churches and institutions across the country. The veneration of relics in Catholic tradition reaches back to 156 A.D. Lourdes is the world’s most visited Catholic pilgrimage site, and more than five million pilgrims go each year to the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes in southern France.
The Church has recognised 72 miracles connected to the intercession of Our Lady of Lourdes. The US tour gives visitors an opportunity to venerate the remains of the visionary whose reported encounters established the devotion at Lourdes.
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