It is telling, for example, that Bernadette Soubirous, who was so sickly as a child that she could not attend school with regularity, had neither the powers of vocabulary, nor the intellectual presumptuousness, to refer to the series of apparitions, during the fortnight that she experienced them, as anything more grandiose than aquero (Occitan for “that”). And that, initially, she had no understanding of what was meant by the phrase “I am the Immaculate Conception,” which was uttered to her, in her own native tongue, by the ‘young lady’ of her visions (after Bernadette herself had been pressed by a local priest, as the apparitions progressed, to inquire as to the lady’s name), so that she’d had to repeat the words to herself, over and over, phonetically, as she hurried back to the village from the grotto that day, so that she would not forget how to pronounce them, and would be able to communicate them to the ecclesial authorities who had taken an interest in her case, and who, to some degree, till then, had doubted both her honesty and her soundness of mind (though of course she still had doubters afterward, too).