A. Giannelli Italy Sculpture Saint Bernadette of Lourdes , France 1964 for Sale

A. Giannelli Italy Sculpture Saint Bernadette of Lourdes , France 1964 For Sale

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A. Giannelli Italy Sculpture Saint Bernadette of Lourdes , France 1964:
$74.99

Here is a beautiful alabaster sculpture of Saint Bernadette Soubirous that is signed by A. Giannnelli of Italy. The piece is dated 1964. St. Bernadette was known as "The Lady Of The Broom". She stands 14" on a piece of marble that is 4" square. She has No chips or cracks or breaks. She was canonized in 1933. Here is a little history of this lovely Saint.
Fr. Roger J. Landry
The Anchor
Putting Into the Deep
February 15, 2008
"Today I would like to turn our attention to the other major figure in Lourdes, St. Bernadette Soubirous, the 75th anniversary of whose canonization we mark this year. In most parts of the world, including the United States, the Church celebrates her feast on the day she died, April 16. But in France, they solemnly commemorate her birth into eternal life on February 18, within the octave of the feast day of Our Lady of Lourdes and the day on which Mary, speaking to Bernadette for the first time, told her that she did not promise to make her happy in this world but in the next. This is a fitting enough reason, I’d say, to celebrate her eternal happiness on this day!

She was born in 1844 to a poor, struggling miller and a cleaning woman. When she was ten months old, her mother accidentally fell into the fireplace, burning her breasts so badly that she could no longer nurse her first-born child. Without options, her parents sent her to be nursed outside of town by a woman who had just buried her infant son. Bernadette returned only three years later. By that point, her family had hit such rough times that they had had to move to a damp one-room cellar in what used to be a jail. There she contracted cholera and began her lifelong struggle with asthma. When she was 11, the family could no longer manage to feed her and her younger siblings, so she was sent to live with her godmother and help her run a café. That didn’t work out too well, so she was sent to live with the foster mother who had nursed her as an infant, to serve as a shepherdess and a maid. She returned home only three weeks before the apparitions began, to discover that in the interim her dad had been imprisoned under suspicion of having stolen flour.

Throughout all these years, her family had focused more on mere survival than on their children’s education. Bernadette was illiterate. She was considered so dull and incapable of learning even the most elemental lessons of the Catechism, that she had not made her first Communion. When Mary finally revealed her name to her, “I am the Immaculate Conception,” the unfamiliar words were so big that Bernadette needed to repeat them continuously on the way to her parish priest lest she forget them.

Once the apparitions began, she had many other opportunities to grow in humility. She had to suffer through the incredulity of her family and put up with a seemingly unending series of often belligent interrogations by civil or church leaders, doctors, and skeptics. Pilgrims and onlookers would mob her, try to cut off pieces of her clothing, and take her rosary, scapular and anything else they could grab as keepsakes. As much as these things frustrated her, she bore these indignities with patience, politeness, and serenity. Once the authenticity of the apparitions was affirmed, she went to live at the hospice of the Sisters of Charity and Christian Instruction, in order to try to escape the press of the crowds. There she discerned a vocation to the Sisters of Notre Dame de Nevers and humbly moved far away from the city she had helped to put on the map.

In Nevers, she united herself in a hidden way to the celebration of the Mass by embroidering altar cloths and vestments until asthma claimed her life at the age of 35. Before she died, she likened herself to a broom. “Our Lady used me,” she said. “They have put me back in my corner. I am happy there and stop there.”

Now this humble, sweet, good girl dwells happily in the broom closet of the heavenly mansion.