Marina Warner references Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age numerous times in Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary. One gets the impression that Warner and Harris have discussed Our Lady and Lourdes in considerable depth together. Although each book takes a very different approach to the phenomenon of the Virgin Mary, they complement each other and are both valuable resources for Lourdes pilgrims.

Harris’s book is a study of Lourdes – described by Warner as the most phenomenal sacred site of modern Christendom – from its beginnings as a holy shrine to the end of the First World War. Harris is a secular, non-Catholic scholar, giving her objectivity and authority in her description and history of Lourdes. She is incisive in her analysis of the interplay between the secular and sacred worlds, and her descriptions of the conflicts between and within the secular authorities, the church authorities, the Lourdais and the revolutionaries are penetrating and deeply researched.

This deep and troubled history may have inspired Harris to write Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age to ‘understand without judgment’. It certainly makes the book exceptionally readable and shines magnificent historical lights on Lourdes today.

A story of struggle

The first part of Harris’s book is dedicated to Lourdes’s emergence and the struggles and tensions that arose out of Bernadette’s apparitions. As it is today, Lourdes seems to have put much of this behind it. However, these stories and histories were formative in the birth of Lourdes and its later establishment as a place of pilgrimage and healing. Despite everything (and there was a lot), Lourdes emerged from a difficult period in French history. Harris tells of these struggles through the eyes of the cast of thousands who became involved in Lourdes. This is not a detached, impersonal history. It is more the story of the story that brought Lourdes into being.

Harris discusses Lourdes’s power and influence on many occasions, not least in her chapter on ‘The Battle of the Books’ and the fight between secular positivists and pious believers. At the turn of the century, the struggle to be the authoritative author of Lourdes’s history drew the Pope and the President, as well as apologists and detractors from across France. If the pen is mightier than the sword, this chapter shows how determined the different factions were to use Bernadette’s visions for their ends.

Lourdes emerged in France during the French defeat by Prussia, the 1870-71 Civil War and the campaign to restore the Catholic Bourbon monarchy to France. Harris demonstrates how the story of Lourdes is inextricably bound up in the politics of France and the ideological battle between the Republicans defending positivism and the scientific method and the monarchists defending the faith and the supernatural.

A place of pilgrimage and healing

In the book’s second half, Harris describes with compassion and insight the rise of Lourdes as a place of pilgrimage and healing. We learn from history about the emergence of so much that is familiar to us in Lourdes today: the Hospitalité, the rituals of the piscine and processions, the Medical Bureau and the Accueils, the voitures, the forgons, the brancardiers (the stretcher-bearers to the poor) and even the close relationship between Lourdes and the French railways.

Harris covers the miracles in-depth and sets them in the context of arguments over whether they are explained by faith and the supernatural or by science and medicine. In particular, she deals at length with auto-suggestion and crowd psychology. She also covers the story of Emile Zola’s novel The Three Cities Trilogy: Lourdes, Volume 2 . Harris highlights the many parts of the book that Zola derived from and deliberately misconstrued to support his arguments for positivism over faith.

Although sceptical of some cures, especially the early and poorly documented cases, Harris points to other cures ‘in which the Virgin’s grace seemed limitless.’ She provides, for example, the case of Pierre de Rudder, a Belgian labourer and ‘swinger’ with a three-inch gap in his leg due to an accident. After setbacks and trials, de Rudder makes it to Lourdes (a true pilgrimage). Unable to circumambulate the Grotto three times as planned for his penance, he pleads with Notre Dame de Lourdes to work again. At this point, he rises, walks to the statue of the Virgin and kneels to give thanks. This case is essential for many reasons, not least because it is exceptionally well documented, both pre-and post-cure, and the disability is purely physical, denying the sceptics the opportunity to argue hysteria is cured by auto-suggestion.

Like Warner, Harris writes in depth about the impact of the Marian culture on women. Whilst Warner argues that the Virgin’s perfection sets an unattainable standard for women, which leaves them vulnerable when not achieved, Harris argues that the Virgin’s instruction to Bernadette to exhort the faithful to process and bathe, the origin of the Lourdes pilgrimage movement, released women from the shackles of both Church and State. The pilgrimage movement gave women new and important roles as organisers, carers, and fundraisers, carrying out the vast amount of work needed to arrange the National Pilgrimage. As the movement grew, many other pilgrimages emerged.

The miracle of Lourdes

Harris’s book is deeply researched and well written, even if it is a little difficult at times to keep track of the cast of thousands involved in the Lourdes story. It certainly explains why Warner can describe Lourdes as ‘the most phenomenal sacred site of modern Christendom’. Does the book provide the ‘understanding without judgment’ that Harris seeks? I think the answer is in the affirmative. Unlike Warner’s book, which contains judgements that could grate with some, Harris truly seeks understanding without judgment. In order to do so, she explores the historical, cultural, scientific and religious elements of the Lourdes story in gratifying depth.

As I finish the book, however, I cannot help but feel that Lourdes itself is the miracle. The shrine has survived so much in its 162-year history that it is a miracle that it remains in all its glory. As pilgrims, we get a potted history of Lourdes, which denies us the knowledge of how difficult the birth and survival of this extraordinary place of pilgrimage, peace, and healing were. Even today, the shrine is not free from tensions, albeit minor compared to what it has been through in the past. Whilst many of us rely on faith alone as our motivation for our regular journeys to Lourdes, the story that Harris tells of Lourdes will do much to deepen our faith and understanding of why we are drawn back time and time again to this miracle.

What do you think?

Your views are important, and your fellow readers would love to hear your opinion,
so share your thoughts in the comments box below, and thank you for your time and generosity.

What do you think?

Your views are important, and your fellow readers would love to hear your opinion, so share your thoughts in the comments box below, and thank you for your time and generosity.