Visit Nevers – final resting place of Saint Bernadette of Lourdes
Visit Nevers final resting place of Saint Bernadette of Lourdes
Many people who embark on a Lourdes pilgrimage find that taking a detour to the town of Nevers helps them understand the inspiring life of Bernadette Soubirous with greater clarity.
Tour operators such as Tangney Tours specialise in arranging pilgrimages to France, so that individuals and groups can follow in the footsteps of Bernadette and retrace the stages of her inspiring life.
Each October, Tangney organises a Shrines of France coach pilgrimage tour which begins in Lourdes and concludes in Nevers.
This pilgrimage takes in all the best and most popular shrines associated with Bernadette, a miller's daughter who received 18 visions of the Virgin Mary in 1858 in her home town of Lourdes, in France.
She was just 14 when she received the visions and understandably struggled to cope with the attentions and fame that her experience brought her. Partly because of this, she attended a hospice school which the Sisters of Charity of Nevers had opened in Lourdes.
Bernadette her life after the visions
The Sisters taught Bernadette to read and write and in 1866, at the age of 22, she moved to their motherhouse in Nevers, located in the Burgundy region of central France, about 430 miles north of Lourdes.
Working alongside the sisters would occupy the last 13 years of Bernadette's short life; for a while she was assistant in the infirmary and later she created ornate embroidery for altar cloths and vestments.
She died aged just 35 on April 16th 1879 and her body is now enshrined in a gold and crystal casket in the Chapel of Saint Bernadette in a crypt separate from the graves of the other sisters at the motherhouse.
On December 8th 1933, Bernadette was officially canonised as a Saint by Pope Pius XI.
The three exhumations of Saint Bernadette
One of the miracles used to support her canonisation was established when her body was exhumed by Bishop Gauthey of Nevers in 1909, more than 30 years after her death.
Two doctors and a sister of the community present at the exhumation testified that Bernadette's body appeared preserved from decomposition unlike the crucifix and rosary beads she had been buried with.
In 1919, a second exhumation reported that most of the skin was "still present on most parts of the body".
Wax mask
The body was exhumed for a third time in 1925 when a wax mask was made, taken from a precise imprint of Bernadette's face. Imprints of the hands were also taken procedures which were undertaken to enhance the presentation of the body to the public when it is displayed to pilgrims.
No natural phenomenon'
A report on the final exhumation was published by Doctor Comte in 1928. He noted that the state of perfect preservation of the skeleton "did not seem to be a natural phenomenon".
The Sisters of Nevers maintain a close connection with Lourdes as they also tend the cachot (basement apartment) in Lourdes where Bernadette lived before moving to Lourdes.
The cachot was the place where the Sisters received Pope Benedict XVI in 2008 as he made his way to the grotto in Lourdes where Bernadette received her visions.
His Holiness, like many pilgrims before and since, have visited Lourdes and Nevers to reinforce their faith and get closer to Bernadette's story.
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