Dominique Peyramale

Abbé Dominique Peyramale (9 January 18118 September 1877) was a Catholic priest in the town of Lourdes in France during the apparitions of Our Lady of Lourdes to the peasant girl Bernadette Soubirous in 1858. According to Bernadette, her visions occurred at the grotto of Massabielle, just outside Lourdes.

Parish priest of Lourdes Dominique Peyramale was the parish priest in Lourdes at the time of the apparitions of the Virgin Mary to Bernadette.

Peyramale, under instructions from the bishop of Tarbes, Monsignor Bertrand-Sévère Mascarou Laurence, never visited the grotto during any of the apparitions. He therefore never saw first-hand the effects that these apparitions produced in Bernadette and the onlookers.

Peyramale interviewed Bernadette on a number of occasions. On one occasion, Peyramale asked Bernadette to ask Our Lady to make the rose bush of the grotto bloom. Bernadette would also report to Peyramale that the apparition identified herself as the Immaculate Conception. Before the apparitions, Lourdes was an unimportant parish of around 4300 people, and Peyramale was unimpressed by his appointment there. He is remembered with a statue outside the parish church of Lourdes, which he dedicated much time to building, adjacent to the site of the original parish church which burnt down in 1904.

In popular culture

A street in the town of Lourdes was named after him. In the 1943 film The Song of Bernadette, based on Franz Werfel's 1941 novel of the same name, Abbé Peyramale is portrayed by actor Charles Bickford.