My Life is a Miracle: A Story of Hope and Healing

By Bernadette Moriau

An awe-inspiring story of trust, faith, and God's healing love.

• Be touched by an amazing personal testimony from a religious sister who, after visiting Lourdes, was cured of a deforming paralysis she had suffered for forty years.
• Follow her ten-year journey undergoing scientific investigation into the miracle before she was permitted to share her joy with the world.
• Gain renewed confidence in God's merciful love no matter your circumstances.

Walk with Sister Bernadette on a journey of faith through pain, paralysis, and finally healing to the 70th officially recognized miracle of Lourdes, a miracle she now proclaims to the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Mar 18, 2021
• ISBN: 9781949239652

Book preview

cover.jpg

Publisher: Romain Lizé

Editor-in-Chief: Rev. Sebastian White, o.p.

Managing Editor: David Wharton

Iconography: Isabelle Mascaras

Layout: Julia Pateu

Cover: Gauthier Delauné

Production: Florence Bellot

Proofreading: Samuel Wigutow

Front cover: Sister Bernadette Moriau, 70th miraculous healing in Lourdes

© Guillaume Poli/CIRIC.

Copyright © 2021 by Magnificat Inc. All rights reserved.

First edition: February 2021

Edition number: MGN21023

ISBN: 978-1-949239-65-2

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Magnificat, PO Box 834, Yonkers, NY 10702. www.magnificat.com

To all the suffering

and those who care for them,

whom I invite to discover the graces of Lourdes.

Contents

The Healing

The Secret

The Miracle

My New Life

My Former Life

To You Who Despair

Why Me?

Epilogue

Afterword

Appendices

Chapter I

The Healing

I spent three days in the belly of the whale. I’m talking about Jonah’s whale—Jonah, the prophet in the Bible. You don’t know Jonah? He was thrown overboard because he was a hindrance. The biblical account tells us that the sea monster swallowed him in one gulp, but the man survived for three days hidden in its belly! That time of darkness saved him. Far from crushing him, his time inside the whale—a sort of marine grotto—completely restored him. For God holds the secrets of the labor of childbirth. From nothingness, he creates fullness. From something bad, he makes something new.

Jonah emerged from the fish a new man. I’m not Jonah, just a little old nun who was severely handicapped and disabled, like so many others. I found myself thrown out of the boat of life, a castaway. But I was healed, miraculously. I emerged from a damp grotto in Lourdes totally restored. Don’t ask me how.

Or rather, yes, I will tell you. Because I must tell you everything. Not to convince you with intricate arguments: I am a Franciscan, a disciple of Saint Francis of Assisi; I’ve never been and never will be a theologian. But I write this book to witness to you to what I experienced. Bernadette, to whom the Virgin appeared in Lourdes, told her detractors: I wasn’t sent to make you believe it, just to tell you about it. And so—and this is very important before the pilgrimage I encourage you to make—I offer you this story not for my own glory, but for the glory of God. And especially because the Church has asked me to.

Finally, to those who are wondering, why her?, a nun, and an old one at that, when so many others are suffering, children, young people, mothers, fathers…—I’ll try to answer that too. Yet all I can tell you is that this mystery is beyond me. In my prayer, I never asked for my own recovery. I always prayed for the healing of others.

So, why Jonah? Why this visceral image of three days of silence and burial? Because when I got back from Lourdes, I really did go through three days of pain, of darkness, before I was healed. And because Jonah is a symbol of the Resurrection of Christ our Lord.

So there you have it. I am going to proclaim the light! I’m a Christian. A Catholic, a nun, a Franciscan; I believe in Jesus and in Mary. Without them, nothing I’m going to tell you would make sense.

My three days inside the whale, my three days of darkness, then.

It was July 8, 2008. I was at the end of my tether. It was so hot. Back from Lourdes, I was in my room in our little convent, in Bresles, France, a stone’s throw from the city of Beauvais. Among the daughters of Saint Francis of Assisi it is called a fraternity rather than a convent. It’s a simple house, but always open and welcoming. The return journey was totally exhausting. Twelve hours in that white train—that’s its name, but it really ought to be called the train that takes its sweet time. It toddles along the train tracks of France, its cars filled with the sick, stopping at all the stations, politely shunting into a siding to let the other high-speed trains go by, trains full of people in a hurry, healthy people. They shoot past without giving us a look. Their passing by makes our poor old train quake, but it doesn’t complain. That’s always the way. That’s life.

I was traveling in ambulance 12, as the cars are called. Anne, a volunteer pharmacist, looked after us in our sleeping compartments. Somehow I had managed to lift myself up in the narrow upper bunk I’d been assigned—an ­acrobatic feat when you’re in a brace. I’m wedged into this bed in my corset: that two-faced friend has become my rigid second skin, my companion in misfortune without which I wouldn’t be able to stand up. It protects me, a little, from the continuous shocks of the railroad tracks. Fortunately, the morphine eases the pain. I allowed myself to increase the dose a little to help on this journey. Without this other medicinal two-faced friend, it would truly be insupportable. Twelve hours lying in that rolling railway oven was exhausting, even if you manage, as always, to put up with the pain.

Pain? What pain? I was sixty-nine years old at the time. I’d been battling this disease for forty-two years. It had started when I was ­twenty-seven with lower back pains. This ended in cauda equina syndrome, which is a polyradicular attack of the lumbar and sacral base. But I don’t want to clobber you with all the medical terms. I’ll tell you about it in more detail, but what it amounts to in practice is semi-­paralysis. My left foot was in an almost completely backward position. My back, spine, and pelvis were like jelly. They were supported by a rigid ­cervical-lumbar corset, which didn’t stop my body from aching, from electric shocks shooting through my legs, or from chronic sciatic pain. I was on a high dose of morphine to ease the burning of these invisible thorns. In the end, the raw sharpness of the pain became so unbearable I had a spinal neuro-stimulator implanted under the skin. Suffice it to say, I was in a bad way.

Motionless at night in my room in Bresles, I relive this trip, for in my mind I’m still in Lourdes. My body weary, my soul at peace, there’s only one thing I can do: pray, unite myself to the Lord, through Mary. I’ll come back to that later. I prayed for all those sick people I’d crossed paths with during the pilgrimage. Many were more seriously afflicted than I was. I can still get around—a little. Without the morphine, my spine would be incandescent with pain. But who am I to complain? My place in the world as a nun is to be there for them, for others, not for myself. I offered the life God gave me to him and to others. If my health doesn’t allow me to help them anymore—I used to be a nurse—I can at least pray for them, full-time, for their healing, their well-being. I’m thinking in particular of Corinne and Claire, both younger than I, who are afflicted with multiple sclerosis. They’re both stuck for good in wheelchairs, but with big smiles on their faces. And so many others. My God, how many sorrows. Why all this suffering? Why this illness? Hear my cry, Lord!

I cry out in silence. That’s prayer as well. Not a revolt—a plea. Three days and three nights went by like this in that month of July 2008. The time to recover from the journey, to recover from the pilgrimage. But no real recovery, since I’m disabled and my condition is sure to get worse. Without any possible doubt, without any possible remission. My Calvary was traced out before me. I had totally accepted it and expected no miracle. Lord, may your will, not mine, be done.

But, it’s true, I returned from Lourdes more at peace than ever. I felt no resentment about my condition. I gave my life to God. He makes of it, and will make of it, what he will.

It was Friday. That was three days I’d been back now. Ah, Jonah, how did you manage to get out of your prison? Do you have the key? Know the code? Was it pure unconditional faith? Hope? Or is it quite simply the cross, since Jesus came after you, Jonah, to open wide the path to redemption? In the meantime, I’m paying hard cash for the journey. The soul is fine, but in this sick body, it’s hard. Fortunately, the morphine helps.

The cross… But look—it’s just time for Adoration. I hear the footsteps of Sister Marie-Albertine. She’s nineteen years my senior. We have so much in common. She’s heading for the chapel. It’s five o’clock. Time to go. I like this face-to-face encounter with God in the Sacred Host, before whom we kneel—for God is truly there, truly present.

I have in my hand my still almost-new wooden rosary beads that Sister Marie-Albertine gave me on our 2008 pilgrimage to Lourdes. They’ve never left me since. For us Catholics, the rosary is both a tool of prayer and a prayer itself. I recite it often. My mother taught me the rosary. My rosary is my lifeline to God.

God, you are present everywhere, in everyone, and particularly in this chapel. I come to give you thanks for that pilgrimage to Lourdes. To say thank you, from the bottom of my heart.

It had been almost twenty-three years since I’d last been to Lourdes. The first time was when I was eleven. We didn’t have any money. My dad was often sick. My mom worked as a cleaner. We’d wait for her weekly wages to settle up at the corner shop and with the green­grocer. (We rarely ate meat). It was the parish priest who paid for my trip, with my dad, to make my profession of faith. We traveled all the way from our home in the north to the grotto near the Pyrénées. Back then, that was the end of the world to me.

The second time I went to Lourdes was just before I entered religious life. The newspaper La Vie catholique ran a competition with a trip to Lourdes as the grand prize. I won by explaining in my letter why it was my dream to go there before entering the convent. That trip made a great impression on me. The thing I remember most: it was while there that I learned of the death of Pope Pius XII.

I returned for a third time in 1970 with my little sister before she died, and then again in 1985 with my family.

The last time I went, it wasn’t my superior or my spiritual director who encouraged me to return, but my general practitioner, Dr. Christophe Fumery. Ah, without him, none of this would have happened. I would go to see him every month to renew my prescription for that cursed morphine. This layman, a committed Christian but a doctor before all else, had for forty years accompanied the white train of the sick of the diocese of Beauvais.

It was he who suggested I return to Lourdes.

You’re not coming on the pilgrimage to Lourdes with the sick of the diocese?

Oh, Doctor, I laughed, I gave up hope of a miracle ages ago!

I just can’t help it. How like me to speak too soon, without thinking. As I left his office, I felt ashamed for answering him like that. There I was, a nun for almost fifty years, with the faith anchored in my very being, and I retorted that I didn’t believe in miracles any more! I can’t get over it now, but how could I have imagined that such a grace would fall into my lap? If anyone was to be healed during that pilgrimage, it surely wouldn’t be me. And then, for four decades, I’d so intensely lived my illness, I’d so totally identified with it. I was certain I’d end my days with my disease. For me, healing was unthinkable.

And then, nuns don’t travel around just like that. Lourdes is far away, and we Franciscans are sworn to a vow of poverty. It had however been proposed that I could go to Lourdes for my fiftieth jubilee of religious life. But that was still some way off.

Nevertheless, I couldn’t get the doctor’s suggestion out of my head. The idea grew and grew to the point of obsession. Lourdes—why not? It started to seem obvious. I spoke about it to the superior general of the Oblate Franciscan Sisters of the Sacred Heart, my congregation. Without hesitation, she told

Reviews for My Life is a Miracle

[Gerardo T De Dios · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Very inspiring memoirs! Almost like reading our own life's story - as long as we look @ our lives honestly. I intend to read it again in order to re-digest the wonderful gems of faith it contains. Thank you, Sis Bernadette for sharing your story of faith!