The part of Bernadette's life that the Church examined when it canonised her is the part that happened after Lourdes had stopped needing her.
Nevers
In 1866 she entered the Sisters of Charity of Nevers, several hundred kilometres from Lourdes, and never returned to the grotto. She was given ordinary work in the infirmary and the sacristy. Her novice mistress and her superior treated her with a coolness that later biographers have found hard to explain and that she appears to have accepted without complaint.
The refusal
Visitors came to Nevers to see the visionary and were mostly turned away. She declined to profit from the story in any form, said repeatedly that her part in it was finished, and asked to be left in the community as an ordinary sister.
Illness and death
She had been ill since childhood. A tubercular disease of the bone in her right knee left her in severe pain for the last years, and she died at Nevers on 16 April 1879, aged thirty-five.
Canonisation
She was beatified in 1925 and canonised by Pius XI on 8 December 1933, the feast of the Immaculate Conception. The point that is easy to miss: the Catholic Church does not canonise anyone for having seen a vision, and it did not canonise her for one. Approval of a private revelation and recognition of personal sanctity are separate processes resting on separate evidence, and her cause turned on the thirteen years at Nevers rather than on the eighteen appearances at the grotto.