Bishop Mark Davies of Shrewsbury has drawn a comparison between pilgrims venerating the relics of St Bernadette and mourners paying the final respects to Queen Elizabeth II.
In homilies delivered in Shrewsbury Cathedral yesterday and St Werburgh’s Church, Chester, this afternoon, the bishop said that in both instances people wished to revere people whom they esteemed highly.
He said: “In our time of national mourning, we have witnessed the reverence and love with which the mortal remains of our departed Queen Elizabeth have been received on their last journey across our land.
“Her Majesty’s mortal remains are a tangible connection with our late Monarch, recalling the memory of her dedicated life and inviting prayer among the many who have stood along the roadways or passed before them.
“These scenes might help us appreciate how the Church, from the beginning treated the bodies of the Saints with great reverence, as those who had lived united with Christ who left for us the memory of their witness and are now forever united with Christ in Heaven.
“And while we pray for our beloved Queen, as we pray for each other in the hour of death, the Church has always invited us to ask the Saints to pray for us.
“And so it is, with the pilgrimage of the relics of Saint Bernadette across our country, they provide us with a tangible connection with the heroic life of this young woman; and as we venerate them with reverence, we are invited to ask her prayers in Heaven as we continue our journey on earth.”
Bishop Davies said the relics will connect the faithful with a saint who was frail and poor and who might challenge contemporary society on its attitudes to “the frailest and weakest from the unborn to the sick and to the aged”.
The relics might also inspire the faithful to recognise more fully their own calling to holiness and to their own particular Christian vocations.
The relics of St Bernadette arrived in England at the beginning of September and have so far passed through the Archdiocese of Westminster and the dioceses of Portsmouth, Plymouth, Clifton, Cardiff and Menevia.
Overall, the relics of St Bernadette will be in England, Scotland and Wales, until November 1 as they continue their tour through all of the dioceses.
The relics include 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.
The tour will give British Catholics the chance to make a personal pilgrimage to the saint and to pray for her intercession.
In 2012 the relic of the heart of St John Vianney, the patron of parish priests, was brought to the Diocese of Shrewsbury, and neighbouring dioceses, in a highly successful tour aimed at helping young people to discern their vocations.
Three years earlier the visit of the relics of St Thérèse of Lisieux to Britain attracted a quarter of a million people to queue up to pray at the side of the reliquary of the “Little Flower”.
St Bernadette, whose real name was Marie Bernarde Soubirous, 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.
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