Visions at Lourdes

February 11, 1858

A fourteen-year-old shepherdess in the Pyrenean town of Lourdes reported eighteen visitations by a woman in white in a grotto by the river Gave. Bernadette Soubirous's visions were investigated, authenticated, and developed into one of the great Catholic pilgrimage sites of the modern world, drawing millions a year. Bernadette herself entered a convent, refused all celebrity, and died at thirty-five, canonized as a saint in 1933.