![]() Bernadette didn’t attend the consecration of the Lourdes basilica in 1876 and spent her short adult life as an unassuming nun. Moreover, it was not beyond the realms of possibility that she might make another appearance on Earth, to a hopeful girl of the suburbs! After all, it had only taken four years for the authorities to decide that St Bernadette wasn’t letting her imagination run away with her, and once endorsed Our Lady of Lourdes paved the way for Our Lady of Knock, Fatima, Medjugorye et al.Īlthough little Marie-Bernarde Soubirous’s visions of the late 1850s led, with astonishing speed, to the establishment of a world famous healing shrine at Lourdes, she herself shunned the limelight. The smiling Mary of grottos and school alcoves was the ultimate Flower Fairy, as pretty as she was heavenly. One of my grandmothers lived in Kilkenny and if it wasn’t raining the local grotto was the incentive for a summer evening’s constitutional. I was born in the Marian Year of 1954, the heyday of the parish “grotto”, when so many Irish communities were setting up wayside rock gardens and shrines dedicated to Our Lady. This was the standard issue BVM of my early childhood. To begin with, my fondness for the Blessed Virgin Mary had a lot to do with her looks: the free-flowing hair and robes of white and azure-blue, the gilded crown, and the contrast between her Mona Lisa smile and the serpent squirming under one of her dainty feet.
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