St. Bernadette’s relics draw hundreds of pilgrims to Emmitsburg despite heavy rain

EMMITSBURG – Despite driving rain and some of the worst road conditions she said she has ever encountered, Brooke White left her home in Wayne, Pa., at 6 a.m. Sept. 22 for the two-and-a-half-hour trek to Emmitsburg.

Brooke White, who lives two and a half hours away in Wayne, Pa., and said she returned to her faith several years ago, has an intimate moment with the relics of St. Bernadette Soubirous Sept. 22, 2026, at the National Shrine Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes on the campus of Mount St. Mary’s University in Emmitsburg. (Kevin J. Parks/CR Staff)

A self-described “revert” to Catholicism who believes her return to the faith five years ago was guided by the Blessed Virgin Mary, White was drawn to what she called a “once-in-a-lifetime” opportunity to venerate relics of St. Bernadette Soubirous.

The relics – rib fragments, kneecaps and samples of muscle, hair and skin from the French saint – were at the National Shrine Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes as one of the first stops on a “Journey of Grace” tour of 140 locations across the country. Also on hand were two sizable rocks from Lourdes, France.

Gently resting her hands against the plexiglass encasing an ornate, gold-plated reliquary that housed the relics, White appeared entranced as she knelt in the presence of the sacred objects inside the shrine’s glass chapel.

Her prayer, she said later, was to ask St. Bernadette to intercede on her behalf and provide whatever graces she most needs to navigate personal challenges.

“I just wanted to receive whatever God himself wanted to send through the saints today,” said White, who regularly attends Mass at Villanova University in Philadelphia.

Jacob Calis, a junior at Annunciation High School, a private school in the Catholic tradition unaffiliated with the Archdiocese of Baltimore, touches stones from the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes in France, which were displayed with the relics of St. Bernadette Soubirous, Sept. 22, 2026, at the National Shrine Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes on the campus of Mount St. Mary’s University in Emmitsburg. (Kevin J. Parks/CR Staff)

White was among more than 650 people who showed up at the shrine to venerate the relics despite miserable weather. The relics will remain at the shrine Sept. 23 before moving to St. Bernadette in Severn, part of the Pastorate of Christ the King and St. Bernadette, and the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen in Homeland later in the week.

Among those waiting silently to venerate the relics in Emmitsburg were very elderly women using walkers and young mothers nursing babies. There were women wearing lace mantillas (veils) and others with nose piercings.

Jacob Calis, a junior at Annunciation High School in Emmitsburg, a private school in the Catholic tradition that is unaffiliated with the Archdiocese of Baltimore, was among 25 fellow students who venerated the relics.

The 16-year-old parishioner of St. Anthony in Emmitsburg said he has a special devotion to St. Bernadette and often visits the Shrine Grotto of Lourdes, the oldest replica in the United States of the Grotto of Lourdes in France.

“Even though she came from a poorer family, even though she came from almost nothing, she was still called by God to experience something so amazing as the Blessed Virgin Mary appearing to her as the Immaculate Conception,” he said. “I think that she was such an extremely important figure in that time period because people were not aware of the power of Mary’s intercession.”

For Dawn Walsh, executive director of the National Shrine Grotto of Lourdes, the turnout reflected the enduring appeal of a saint whose visions transformed a small French town into one of the world’s foremost pilgrimage destinations.

Between Feb. 11 and July 16, 1858, a young Bernadette reported 18 apparitions of a “beautiful Lady” in a grotto near Lourdes, France. The Lady called for prayer, penance and conversion and asked that a chapel be built at the site.

During one apparition, St. Bernadette, who later became a nun, was directed to uncover a spring in the grotto, whose water became associated with reports of miraculous healings. For generations, pilgrims seeking physical or spiritual healing have visited Lourdes to drink the water or bathe in pools fed by the spring.

On March 25, 1858, the Lady identified herself as “the Immaculate Conception,” a title Catholics associate with the Blessed Virgin Mary. After an investigation, the local bishop declared the apparitions worthy of belief in 1862.

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“I think Bernadette is a model evangelizer,” Walsh said. “I love her quote, ‘I was charged to tell you, not to make you believe.’ We are called to share the faith with everyone we meet and leave the rest to the Holy Spirit.”

St. Bernadette shows how to “suffer with abandonment to God,” Walsh said, noting that when the saint was suffering from a painful tumor, she told her sisters the baths were not for her. The saint insisted that she must belong entirely to God and God alone, Walsh said, never to herself.

Laci Lombardi, a parishioner of St. John the Evangelist in Frederick, came to the shrine with her husband and their 20-month-old son. She wasn’t able to venerate the relics because she was caring for her son, but she called it a special grace just to pray in their presence. Nearly every day, she said, she reads her son stories from a saints’ book, and St. Bernadette is one of their favorites.

More than 650 pilgrims from across the region attend the veneration of relics and Mass for St. Bernadette Soubirous Sept. 22, 2026, at the National Shrine Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes on the campus of Mount St. Mary’s University in Emmitsburg. (Kevin J. Parks/CR Staff)

“Never in my life did I ever think I’d be just a few feet away from a relic,” she said. “So it’s pretty incredible.”

In his homily at a morning Mass that drew nearly 300 people, Institute of the Incarnate Word Father Cesar Ramirez, shrine chaplain, noted that although all are called to holiness, the path to sanctity has many obstacles. Saints such as St. Bernadette are models, he said.

Sometimes people err by thinking they can make it to heaven through prayer alone or through works alone. Both are needed, he said. Father Ramirez quoted St. Augustine’s teaching that God created humanity without human help, but did not will to save humanity without its cooperation.
“We must cooperate with God’s grace and not hinder it,” said Father Ramirez, who sprinkled blessed water from Lourdes on congregants following Mass. “We must follow the saints because they follow Christ.”

For more information on the relics next stops in Severn and Baltimore, click here.

Email George Matysek at gmatysek@CatholicReview.org

Use the navigation arrows below to see a photo slideshow by Kevin J. Parks. Additional images from the event can be viewed and purchased here.