Before the Movie, Meet the SaintSt. Bernadette's Relics Come to America
As of September 2026, the relic of St. Bernadette Soubirous is making its way across the United States for the next year. This gives the faithful across the country a rare opportunity to encounter and venerate the saint who began as an ordinary young girl from Lourdes, long before anyone knew her for her holiness.
What is the St. Bernadette Relic Tour?
The tour began September 18–20 with an opening celebration at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C., where the relic was welcomed with an opening Mass celebrated by Cardinal Robert McElroy, Archbishop of Washington. From there, the relic continues on a yearlong pilgrimage across the country, stopping at roughly 140 locations — cathedrals, basilicas, shrines, seminaries, Catholic universities, hospitals, and parishes.
The relic is housed in a 132-pound reliquary crafted by Maison Granda in Spain. According to the official acts preserved in the archives of Nevers — the Latin-language canonical records documenting the extraction and authentication of her remains — what's carried on tour includes fragments of two ribs, her kneecaps, a sample of muscle from her right femur, and hair.
Why Venerate a Relic?
For Catholics, the invitation to venerate relics, the opportunity for nearness to the saints can be profound. They remind us that God created us body and soul, and calls us all to eternal life with him — the life the saints experience now. To pray with a relic gives us a moment in real proximity to a person who lived the life of holiness we are called to inside an ordinary body — a body that suffered, grew weary, endured illness, yet pursued holiness in spite of all that.
That's part of what makes Bernadette's story compelling even outside a purely devotional context. She wasn't chosen because she was exceptional by the world's standards. She was poor, uneducated, chronically sick, and, by her own account, unremarkable. What she became after her encounters at the grotto — a woman who endured relentless questioning, entered religious life, and died young and largely unknown to the public — is a study in what it looks like to live with unwavering conviction under harsh scrutiny.
Encountering her relic is a way of engaging that reality directly: not a statue, not a stained-glass version of her, but a physical trace of a real person who actually lived this.
How to Attend
Each stop on the tour typically includes a public veneration period, and many host a Mass or a talk on the message of Lourdes. Because the schedule spans a full year and roughly 140 locations, the best way to find a stop near you is to check the official tour route directly, since dates and host parishes are added on a rolling basis. Local dioceses and parishes hosting a stop usually publish their own details as the date approaches — worth watching if there's a cathedral or shrine in your area.
This relic tour and Bernadette and the Lady of Lourdes are telling the same story in two beautifully different ways. One lets you stand in the physical presence of who Bernadette was. Our film lets you sit with the interior experience of what her life actually required of her — the doubt, the obedience, the suffering, the long years after Lourdes that rarely make it into the popular version of her story. If the relic tour draws someone to Bernadette's story this year, the film is there to deepen it: not with certainty without pain, but with what faith does with suffering.
Wherever you’re at on your own journey, consider paying Bernadette a visit at some point on the tour in the United States, and allow yourself to be impacted by the holiness she lived as a fully human, imperfect, and limited person. And be sure to get your tickets to Bernadette and the Lady of Lourdes as soon as they’re released in April, 2027, so you can enter into the interior depth of her story and what she was about.