"I am the Immaculate Conception."
Thursday, March 25, 1858 Bernadette joyfully rejoined the lady in the grotto. It had been 3 weeks since she saw Aquero (Bernadette began to refer to the vision as Aquero, which means simply, 'It', and said that the Lady spoke in the Lourdes dialect, 'sweet and gentle', and not in French) and had not known whether she would ever appear again. This time she was determined to obtain the lady's name, so that she could finally tell the priest.
Bernadette was characteristically stubborn, and she repeated four times the question she had practiced so often, "Would you be so kind as to tell me who you are?" The answer finally came: "I am the Immaculate Conception."
The Church declared that Mary was the "Immaculate Conception" only four years earlier in 1854. The title would certainly have been unknown to Bernadette since it was not broadly discussed in the liturgy, and Bernadette still could not read or write. She was only then learning her catechism to prepare for first Holy Communion, a task undertaken typically by children six or seven years her junior. It was her poor health and her family's poverty that had hindered her education.
