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Marketplace for Miracles  A smattering of the "holy items" available commercially in Lourdes, where the devout gather to seek miracle cures. |
One side of the Church
of TheColumnists.com
Catholic Church attendance may be falling due to sex scandals but the main shrines are crowded with pilgrims this summer. The sites of Virgin Mary “apparitions” -- including Fatima in Portugal, Guadalupe in Mexico and 11 other official locations--will attract millions of people this season.
The biggest draw of all is Lourdes, nestled in the foothills of the French Pyrénées, where I have just spent several days looking for evidence that people still go for this kind of spiritual reinforcement. They surely do. The Lourdes grotto expects more than 6 million visitors this year from throughout the world, and the total rises every year. Thousands of them arrive in wheelchairs–and most of them go home that way.
The Lourdes people called me a "fallen-away Catholic" for my lapsed faith but they still hope I will return to the fold some day. One incident gave me pause. An Irish volunteer grabbed my arm and started dragging me toward the baths for a ritual cleansing. I managed to pull away but it was a close call.
The only apparition I had was a flashback to Pascal’s Wager, which counsels belief in the Almighty because you have nothing to lose and everything to gain. That wasn’t enough to sway me, though. I guess I’m just not ready.
Lourdes has grown from a village of 4,000 to a respectable town of 16,000 inhabitants, largely due to a peasant girl’s 18 reported sightings of the Virgin Mary in 1858. Today, the contrast between the towering Pyrénées, the devout crowds and the crass commercialism is striking.
Dozens of somewhat tacky shops line the steep and crooked streets, selling statues of the Virgin ranging from pocket-size to life-size. The official guides ask visitors to be indulgent with the “moneychangers in the temple”. “The articles are mostly sold at low prices,” the guide explains rather lamely.
Yet even for a crusty agnostic like me,
there is something grandiose about life in Lourdes. Every day,
a huge procession of believers–hundreds of them suffering
from terminal illnesses–wends its way along a mountain torrent
into a grand underground basilica to celebrate mass together.
Liturgical music blasts from outdoor loudspeakers along the route
and priests swing their burners to release clouds of incense.
The senses are overwhelmed.
It is the gathering of the gravely ill
and severely crippled that finally gets to you. Although Lourdes
originally had nothing to do with healing, the waters of Le Gave
river roaring down from the mountains acquired a reputation for
miraculous powers around the grotto. Today, planeloads of organized
groups principally from France, Italy, Spain, Ireland and Germany,
accompanied by their own medical teams, still fly
in. Ireland, the hardest hit by Church scandals, has booked places
for 42,000 visitors this year.
At the baths, I saw volunteers and professional medical staff gently lifting the lame and halt from their wheelchairs to perform the cleansing ritual. Others waited patiently for their turn.
Occasionally, someone will get a rush of
euphoria and feel better–sometimes he or she even seems
cured. An average of 40 claims of unexplained healing are registered
annually, about a quarter of which are deemed sufficiently sound
to be followed up medically for confirmation. The total since
claims were recorded is over 7,000, of
which 67 have been accepted by the church as “miracles”.
Lourdes used to display a pile of wooden crutches left behind by visitors. The crutches were removed a few years ago when the grotto was redesigned and renovated, but the memory remains with me from my first visit there several years ago.
While back in Lourdes recently, I chatted at some length with the newly appointed head medical officer, the man charged with maintaining scientific rigor in the investigation of healings. “When a case is reported, we are here to learn what happened, not to build ‘miracles’ he told me, wiggling his fingers in air quotes.
The most frequent claims were registered at the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries but advances in medical science in recent years have made the confirmation process more rigorous. The most recent “miracle” cure, recognized by the church in 1999, was a Frenchman suffering from multiple sclerosis (MS). After 15 years in a wheelchair, the man visited Lourdes, underwent the baths and was judged to have been spontaneously, permanently and unexplainably cured.
The top doctor, an affable public health specialist of American-Italian descent, Harvard educated, has not lost his scientific bearings. He declares religion to be “irrational, by definition” but says science alone cannot explain some of the occurrences at Lourdes either.
In our chat, he did his best to reconcile his scientific training with the history of unexplained recoveries at Lourdes. “At one extreme of this argument, you have religious faith. At the other extreme you have medical science. Both are somewhat fundamentalist. Reason can be found in between. They can enlighten each other.”
©2010 by Michael Johnson. The photo of is the property of the author. This column first posted July 5, 2010.
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