Bernadette Soubirous

Saint Bernadette Soubirous was a young French girl to whom the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared eighteen times at the grotto of Massabielle in Lourdes in 1858. Born in poverty in 1844, she was sickly and uneducated, yet the Marian apparitions she reported led to Lourdes becoming the most visited Marian shrine in the world. She later became a nun and died at age thirty-five.