I’m sure, like many families, when we gather together as a family, we talk about people in the past, our parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles, people who we’ve known. That’s when the old biscuit tin comes out, which contains all the photographs, all the memorabilia, all the things that help us to remember those people who’ve gone before us, and we spend an hour or two going through them all. 

All of us like to be, somehow, put in contact with people that we’ve known. In Victorian times, for example, people used to wear lockets with a little piece of hair of someone that they loved very dearly.
Relics help us to come in contact with, if you like, and come closer to people that we admire and we love from the past. This is certainly true of St Bernadette’s relics as they come to our diocese. They will help to put us in touch with Bernadette and they will help us bring Bernadette closer to each one of us and through her intercession, closer to Our Lady and to the Lord. 

Bernadette was born in the town of Lourdes in the south of France in 1844 and she lived a very poor and very simple life, with her mother and father and eight siblings. But between February 11 and July 16, 1858, she experienced 18 apparitions of Our Blessed Lady in a little cave down by the River Gave in Lourdes. And the basic message of the apparitions was to call people to conversion through penance, through penitence. Our Lady also told Bernadette to go to the local priest and to ask him to build a chapel and to encourage people to come in procession. During the course of the apparitions, she revealed her name to Bernadette. She said, ‘I am the Immaculate Conception’, a name that Bernadette really couldn’t have made up because she was very uneducated. 

Not long after the apparitions, Bernadette went from Lourdes and joined the Sisters of Charity at Nevers. She lived in the convent for the rest of her life, and she died in 1879. She was beatified in 1925 and was canonised in 1933. 

We’re very blessed that the relics of St Bernadette are going to come to our diocese, in three places. They’ll come to the cathedral at Coulby Newham on October 2 from 1.30pm and right through until 12.30pm on Monday October 3. Then they’ll go to Ampleforth, arrive there round about 1.30pm and will remain there until 5pm. And then they will come to Our Lady of Lourdes & St Peter Chanel Church on Cottingham Road in Hull on October 5 from 7pm until 7am the next morning. 

Please take advantage of these opportunities, they don’t come very often and I’m very, very sure that you individually, your families and all the people that you’re praying for, will be blessed as a result of the coming of St Bernadette’s relics to our diocese. 

Yours in blessed hope,

+ Terry