The relics of St Bernadette are to tour Britain from September 3-30, Cardinal Vincent Nichols has announced.

The dates and venues of the tour have been agreed – and besides cathedrals and major churches will include a visit to Wormwood Scrubs prison in west London, St Mary’s University in Twickenham, London, and several hospices. There will also be an ecumenical event involving the relics in Liverpool.

The relics involve fragments of two ribs, the saint’s kneecaps, muscle from the right thigh, and other muscle, skin and hair tissue, which are kept in a reliquary.

Cardinal Nichols, the Archbishop of Westminster, told journalists this week that the tour will begin at Westminster Cathedral, London, where the relics will be available for veneration from September 3-5.

Cardinal Nichols said: “There are two objectives in this – one is to encourage people to come into church again and to enter into the spirit of the simplicity of Bernadette’s life and openness to God.

“The second is obviously to enter into the practice of pilgrimages to Lourdes itself.”

He continued: “The message of Lourdes is very remarkable. I can put it in a story like this – Lourdes is the only place I have ever been where if you go into a bar with people in wheelchairs then the barmen will move the tables and chairs out of the way to give access to the wheelchairs.

“There is a certain turning on the head of contemporary priorities when you go to Lourdes that is strengthening and affirming for many people.”

The tour will give British Catholics the chance to make a personal pilgrimage to the French saint, to venerate her and to pray for her intercession.

It is hoped that the tour will be as successful as the visit of the relics of St Thérèse of Lisieux to Britain in 2009, which attracted a quarter of a million people to queue up to pray at the side of the casket of the “Little Flower”.

St Bernadette, whose real name was Marie Bernarde Soubisrous, was an illiterate French girl who received apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary at the age of 14 years.

Between February 11 and July 16 of 1858 St Bernadette witnessed 18 apparitions of at a natural cavity in the rock face, or grotto, at Massabielle at the side of the River Gave in the village of Lourdes.

They involved a vision of a “small young lady”, dressed in white with a blue girdle and yellow roses on her feet, who imparted messages to St Bernadette, telling her that people must offer prayer and penance for their sins, and visit Lourdes on pilgrimage.

Bernadette was urged to ask the lady who she was. The reply, in the local dialect, was: “Que soy era Immaculada Conceptiou (I am the Immaculate Conception).”

The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception – that Our Lady was conceived in a state of natural justice rather than with the stain Original Sin – had been defined as dogma by Pope Pius IX just four years earlier.

At first, people were sceptical and local clergy came under suspicion of putting words into the mouth of Bernadette. Her parents, teachers and priests later testified that they had never mentioned the phrase “Immaculate Conception” to her.

By March 4 the crowds accompanying her to the grotto had grown to about 200,000 people. The Lady told her to build a chapel at the site of the spring, to which pilgrims could come in procession, and wash in, and drink from.

This opened in 1862 and by 1870 Lourdes was the most visited pilgrimage destination in Europe, thanks largely to the spread of the railway. The Lady had not promised cures for the sick but pilgrims began to bring their sick with them.

After the apparitions ceased, Bernadette boarded with the Sisters of Charity at a hospice for five years until in 1866, at the age of 22, she was accepted as a novice in the convent of the Sisters of Notre Dame at Nevers.

She stayed at the convent until she died, not leaving even to attend the opening of a new basilica at Lourdes in 1876.

She suffered grievously asthma and tuberculosis and died on 16 April 1879 at the age of 35 years. When her body was exhumed in 1909 it was found incorrupt, preserved from decomposition.

Bernadette was beatified in 1925 and canonised by Pope Pius XI as St Maria Bernarda on December 8, 1933, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. Today, Lourdes continues to attract about five million pilgrims ever year.

(Photo: JEAN-PHILIPPE KSIAZEK/AFP via Getty Images)

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