SVETA BERNARDICA U HRVATSKOJ USMENOJ LIRICI
ST. BERNADETTE IN CROATIAN ORAL LYRICS

Summary/Abstract: St. Bernadette (Marie-Bernarde Soubirous) was born on 7 February 1844 at Lourdes to a poor miller’s family. Our Lady appeared to Bernadette eighteen times. All apparitions took place from 11 February to 16 July 1858. On 16 July 1860 Bernadette entered the convict of nuns at Lourdes where she remained six years. She left Lourdes for good on 4 July 1866 and after three days arrived to St. Gildars monastery at Nevers, a city in the centre of France. On Easter Wednesday, 16 April 1879, she passed to eternity in her thirty-fifth year. St. Bernadette is an exceptionally honoured saint in Catholic Croats. Traditionally many Croats as well as Croatian army and police representatives go on pilgrimage to the place of Our Lady’s apparition to St. Bernadette in the cave Massabielle near Lourdes. The devotion to St. Bernadette is visible in contemporary original recordings of Croatian oral lyric poems in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in the Republic of Croatia, which are quoted and interpreted in the paper. By a comparative method of oral lyric poems with the apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary to St. Bernadette it can undoubtedly be concluded that the content of the quoted and interpreted poems completely corresponds to the testimonies about the apparitions. Pope Pius IX beatified her in 1925, and in 1933 he canonised her on the solemnity of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

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