OUR LADY OF LOURDES; 11th FEBRUARY

 OUR LADY OF LOURDES

11th FEBRUARY

This feast day honours Our Lady as the Immaculate Conception – pure and without sin, as befits the Mother of God. She is all powerful in defeating the evil one. She is the Woman of the Book of Revelation and the Woman of the prophecies. Because of the healing effect of the water at Lourdes, she is, on this feast day, particularly identified as the comforter and healer of the sick.

It must be remembered though, that, although numerous miraculous cures were credibly reported and investigated following visits by the faithful to the shrine at Lourdes, Our Lady’s mandate to St Bernadette was not one of physical well-being. Rather, she advocated that the faithful pray, engaging in penance and pilgrimage. As such, she was guiding us to a spiritual, rather than corporal, healing and well-being.

The month of February is dedicated to the Holy Family whom Pope Leo XIII described as embracing the “perfection and completeness of all domestic virtues.” The model for this month could be to fashion the family in its relations on the Holy Family and to place our trust in Our Lady as our protectress and mediatrix: Appropriate honour lies in the Marian antiphons, (this liturgical season being Ave Regina Caelorum), and a family recital of the Rosary, especially the Joyful or Glorious Mysteries.

Our Lady appeared to fourteen year old Bernadette Soubirous in the vicinity of Lourdes in 1858. She was a poor, uneducated girl and was collecting firewood and bones with her sister, Toinette, to sell in order to buy bread, when a beautiful woman appeared to her, holding a Rosary with two gold roses at her feet. The lady invited Bernadette to pray the Rosary with her.

Initially, after the first appearance, Bernadette was silent about the apparition, but her sister told her mother. The girls received corporal punishment and Bernadette was forbidden by her parents to visit the site. Her mother, similar to the mother of Lucia in the story of Fatima, believed that the child was lying, (as you would). Similarly, the Church took a dim view of the matter and refused to approve the apparition, supporting a sealing off of the area to keep the public away once the initial reports of miracles occurred.

Bernadette and her sister were ordered by their parents never to return to the site. She did revisit the site on 14th February and, afraid that the apparition was a demonic one, threw Holy Water at the figure of Our Lady. She said that the lady smiled and bowed. On 24th February, Bernadette again attended the site and the following day, the Lady told her to dig in the ground. A spring appeared and people began to visit, claiming miraculous cures as a result of bathing or drinking its water. However, as some of the early cures turned out to be hoaxes, or the result of hysteria, the Church continued to refuse to endorse the site, supporting government actions to close it off to the public. Bernadette again attended the site on 27 March and said that the lady said to her “I am the Immaculate Conception”.

In 1860, after an investigative commission by the Church, the local bishop declared that he accepted that the Virgin Mary did indeed appear to Bernadette Soubirous. A sculptor was commissioned to make a statue according to Bernadette’s description. She was canonized by Pope Pius XI in 1933.

The site has been visited by a succession of popes and has attained widespread acceptance throughout conventional Catholic culture. However, belief in the apparition of Lourdes, being a matter of private revelation, is not an article of faith for Catholics, nor is a belief in the miraculous nature of the cures claimed. In fact, Catholics are not obliged to believe in any supernatural event since the death of the last apostle. Indeed, the necessity for a physical manifestation of faith to base one’s belief in the supernatural origins and existence of Christ’s Church is one which is essentially materialist and is, for this reason, secondary to the journey which Catholics are called upon to undertake. The message of Our Lady which underscored the Lourdes manifestation was not a materialistic and physical display, but one of inner conversion and humility, a pilgrimage to the source of metaphysical and spiritual healing.

An interesting aspect of the focus on the physicality of the Lourdes apparition is illustrated by the attitude of Emile Zola. Zola was a firm believer that science had cleared up the mysteries of the universe and a co-traveller with the 19th century journalists who thoughtfully pondered such philosophical questions as: “How could anyone in an age of steam engines and the telegraph believe in God”? An avowed atheist and bitter enemy of Catholicism, Zola set about writing a series of books to accuse the Catholic Church and crush Catholic popular piety.

In August 1892, he went to Lourdes to gather material together for a scathing indictment of Catholicism. The story of Zola is told in an article by George Sim Johnston entitled, “Belief and Unbelief: Emile Zola at Lourdes.” In this story, Zola reveals research techniques in the style of Dan Brown, although Zola could actually write.

However, and unfortunately for his objective reporting, he witnessed a miracle, (two, in fact), and his reaction, reminiscent of many in the main stream media today, says more about Zola and the attitude of those who do not wish to accommodate any challenge to their view, and the lengths they will go to in their refusal to entertain the possibility of the truth of the Church and the existence of God, than it does about the events themselves.

As the author pointed out: Thousands of invalids made the pilgrimage to Lourdes at the time of Zola. However, only a fraction could hope for a cure. The Lourdes Medical Bureau has always been cautious and has thus far recognized only 65 ‘cures’ after the most rigorous medical scrutiny. For Zola to see the place as a miracle factory is to completely miss the point of the pilgrimage. When Our Lady had appeared to St Bernadette, she did not promise miraculous cures; she simply said that people should come to pray and do penance.

The author described the sequence of events as follows:

“Zola attached himself to an 18 year old girl named Marie Lemarchand who was afflicted with three seemingly incurable diseases: an advanced stage of lupus, pulmonary tuberculosis and leg ulcerations the size of an adult’s hand. Zola describes the girl’s face on the way to Lourdes as being eaten away by the lupus: ’The whole was a frightful distorted mass of matter and oozing blood.” The girl went into the baths and emerged completely cured. One of the doctors wrote, ‘On her return from the baths I at once followed her into the hospital. I recognized her well although her face was entirely changed.’ The doctors who examined her could find nothing wrong with her lungs, both of which had been afflicted with tuberculosis, causing the patient to cough and spit blood. Sixteen years later she was still in perfect health and the cure was designated as official.’

Zola was there when she came out of the baths. He had said, ‘I only want to see a cut finger dipped in water and come out healed.’ The President of the Medical Bureau, Dr Boissarie, was standing beside him. ‘Ah Monsieur Zola, behold the case of your dreams!’

‘I don’t want to look at her!’ replied Zola, ‘To me, she is still ugly.’ And he walked away.

Zola subsequently witnessed a second cure at Lourdes, that of a Mlle Lebranchu, who was suffering from the final stages of tuberculosis. He told Dr Boissarie, ‘Were I to see all the sick at Lourdes cured, I would not believe in a miracle.’ He put the second cure in his novel Lourdes (1894), but depicted the woman as relapsing into her former condition on the way home, the implication being that the cure was neither permanent nor supernatural, but rather a cause of autosuggestion in an hysterical religious atmosphere.

But Zola, who remained in communication with the woman long after her recovery, was perfectly aware that there had been no relapse. When Dr Boissarie questioned him as to the honesty of his account, pointing out that he had come to Lourdes to make an impartial investigation, Zola replied that he was an artist and could do whatever he liked with his material.”

Zola’s response to Dr Boissarie, on analysis, is again, reminiscent of Dan Brown, defending his novel by the claim of “fiction”, (as an “artist”), and yet presenting the “fiction” as “fact”.

The desperation of the scientific world to divorce itself from any religious dimension reveals a decidedly unscientific aspect in considering phenomena such as the cures at Lourdes: prejudice, and a reluctance to confer recognition, to acknowledge the possibility of a supernatural dimension, or to vest any credit in the Catholic Church or Catholic piety, results in the complete disregard by the medical and scientific community of the Lourdes miracles, to the impoverishment of a greater objective understanding of the operation of the mind, body and its spiritual connection.

Bearing in mind the bleakness of a life lived in reference solely to the material, and the emptiness of a reality in which truth is variable in order to serve expedience, perhaps a tribute to St Bernadette should include thanks to Our Lady for inspiring us to lift our gaze to the transcendent beauty of a stronger engagement with our purpose and a deeper dimension to our lives. The traditional methods of honouring Our Lady, of course, have application on the Feast of St Bernadette and we must give thanks to this young girl for bringing an awareness of the presence of Our Lady, with her comfort, her beauty and her joy, into our lives.