Over the more than sixteen decades since fourteen-year-old Bernadette Soubirous first saw, in February 1858, an apparition later identified as the Virgin Mary in a grotto outside her small village of Lourdes in the Pyrenees mountains of France, she and Lourdes have become global phenomena. However, while the girl and the village have become inextricably intertwined in the popular imagination, the roots of their appeal are subtly different. Each year some six million visitors flock to Lourdes, many of them hoping for one of the miraculous cures associated with a grotto spring pointed out by St. Bernadette (as she has been known since 1933). The pilgrimages attract communicants of all religions as well as the simply curious, but for whatever reasons people choose to come, the Roman Catholic Church has carefully framed the Lourdes phenomenon as a function of religious faith as traditionally understood. The appeal of Bernadette, though, has been broader, touching even anti-religious apostles of science like Émile Zola as well as Jewish artistic types including the novelist Franz Werfel and the poet Leonard Cohen. The attraction has been highly personal, deriving from her embodiment of adolescent commitment and common sense – a passionate virgin compared by many to Joan of Arc. Beyond that Bernadette has evolved as a symbol of healing reaching beyond the bodily ills sometimes healed at Lourdes to connect with grieving and despondent spirits. She has become a source of comfort rather than of cure.