Almost a year ago, the establishment friendly Irish music magazine Hot Press published a superficial piece entitled Lourdes: There’s Nothing in the Water.
Written by Eamon McCann, a rebellious former politician who holds such counter cultural positions as supporting the Irish state’s implementations of abortion and same sex marriage, it sarcastically mocked the fact that the church had closed the shrine at Lourdes, as though it had ever suggested that the water was something other than water and therefore immune from spreading disease.
Despite the nasty tone of the article, referring to Lourdes as a ‘golden shower of sanctifying grace’, it is actually of the sort that we should listen to its language. For many boomers such as McCann, they must question what happened to the church they once may not have had faith in, but at least had admiration for. He states: ‘You don’t hear much about the One True Church anymore. It’s drummed into our heads that, while Catholics are Catholics and Protestants are Protestants, we are all essentially one, worshipping the same God, sharing the same Christian values, and so forth’.
This is an important observation.
When Our Lady appeared in rural Southern France in the 1800s to a peasant girl from a dysfunctional family, she gave hope to a French Catholicism that was still living in the shadow of the French Revolution. She gave hope to the rural French maligned by the Parisian influence. Most importantly, she gave hope to those who suffered greatly like St. Bernadette. Not hope of physical relief from their sicknesses, but hope that they may come to accept their mortality. She told St. Bernadette ‘I guarantee you happiness not in this life, but in the next’. St. Bernadette was still only in her 30s when she died from her long term lung problems.
There are 69 scientifically verified miracles connected to the water at Lourdes. Those miracles are compounded by the other associated miracles, such as the discovery of the source of the water there itself in the first place and the apparition that guided St. Bernadette to it.
Life itself is a miracle, the fact that there are some who cannot see that reminds us of the words of Our Lord, ‘And he said to him: If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they believe, if one rise again from the dead’. Miracles are meaningless to those without the propensity for wonder.
Yet the greatest miracle at Lourdes is the conversion that occurs in the hearts of the many who visit it. In 2009, an indie film called Lourdes was released. It was somewhat unusual in its subtlety, not to give a spoiler, but the story makes clear that accepting one’s suffering as St. Bernadette did is a miracle that has been given to millions at Lourdes. You can watch the entire film below, while it doesn’t really capture the joy of Lourdes, it does capture many of the the beautiful things about it.
There is no secular equivalent to Lourdes, for good reason, there is no secular imperative to care for those in need as there is in Lourdes. In Catholic theology, every life is important, every person has beauty and meaning. In the secular realm, they do not. Only a spiritually blind person could look at the care for those in need in Lourdes and fail to see the work of Christ on Earth.
It was for this reason that a frail Pope John Paul II, months away from death, travelled to Lourdes in August 2004 to pray.
Lourdes is a reminder that Our Lord chooses the weak to shame the strong, allows sickness and suffering and hopes that our kindness to those in need can be an instrument to salvation.
It is also a reminder of Our Lady’s purpose, ‘Je Suis L’Immaculate Conception’ she told St. Bernadette. The Immaculate Conception is a miracle. It is a display of God’s supernatural prominence that towers over the fallen and temporary nature of the natural world.
In the film, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, based on the memoir dictated by the blinking eye of paralysed fashion editor Jean Dominique Bauby, a priest offers to bring him on a pilgrimage to Lourdes. He recalls that he has been to Lourdes, remembering that his mistress ended his affair with him after tricking him into going to Lourdes for a weekend. Bauby buys a massive statue of Our Lady for her as a parting gift, from the gift shop just outside of the grotto, during a late night stroll in a scene that shows the magic of the town. It is a marker within the story, with Bauby pursuing his writing more fervently after the flashback.
McCann is certainly right that Catholicism should be seen as different from Protestantism. And certainly from secularism.
Our belief in miracles, both of a spiritual and physical nature, is what sets us apart. And our commitments to charity, to the nobility of suffering with dignity, to the exaltation of the humble and lowly, are what what we should hold dear as a sign that we are of God.