The Project Gutenberg EBook of Lourdes, by Robert Hugh Benson
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Title: Lourdes
Author: Robert Hugh Benson
Release Date: July 1, 2006 [EBook #18729]
Language: English
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LOURDES
BY
THE VERY REV. MONSIGNOR
ROBERT HUGH BENSON
WITH EIGHT FULL PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS
ST. LOUIS MO.:
B. HERDER, PUBLISHER
17, S. BROADWAY
LONDON:
MANRESA PRESS
ROEHAMPTON, S.W.
1914
Nihil Obstat:
S. GEORGIUS KIERAN HYLAND, S.T.D.,
CENSOR DEPUTATUS
Imprimatur:
GULIELMUS F. BROWN,
VICARIUS GENERALIS,
SOUTHWARCENSI.
_15 Maii, 1914._
PREFACE.
Since writing the following pages six years ago, I have had the
privilege of meeting a famous French scientist--to whom we owe one of
the greatest discoveries of recent years--who has made a special study
of Lourdes and its phenomena, and of hearing him comment upon what takes
place there. He is, himself, at present, not a practising Catholic; and
this fact lends peculiar interest to his opinions. His conclusions, so
far as he has formulated them, are as follows:
(1) That no scientific hypothesis up to the present accounts
satisfactorily for the phenomena. Upon his saying this to me I breathed
the word "suggestion"; and his answer was to laugh in my face, and to
tell me, practically, that this is the most ludicrous hypothesis of all.
(2) That, so far as he can see, the one thing necessary for such cures
as he himself has witnessed or verified, is the atmosphere of prayer.
Where this rises to intensity the number of cures rises with it; where
this sinks, the cures sink too.
(3) That he is inclined to think that there is a transference of
vitalizing force either from the energetic faith of the sufferer, or
from that of the bystanders. He instanced an example in which his wife,
herself a qualified physician, took part. She held in her arms a child,
aged two and a half years, blind from birth, during the procession of
the Blessed Sacrament. As the monstrance came opposite, tears began to
stream from the child's eyes, hitherto closed. When it had passed, the
child's eyes were open and seeing. This Mme. ---- tested by dangling her
bracelet before the child, who immediately clutched at it, but, from the
fact that she had never learned to calculate distance, at first failed
to seize it. At the close of the procession Mme. ----, who herself
related to me the story, was conscious of an extraordinary exhaustion
for which there was no ordinary explanation. I give this suggestion as
the scientist gave it to me--the suggestion of some kind of
_transference_ of vitality; and make no comment upon it, beyond saying
that, superficially at any rate, it does not appear to me to conflict
with the various accounts of miracles given in the Gospel in which the
faith of the bystanders, as well as of sufferers, appeared to be as
integral an element in the miracle as the virtue which worked it.
Owing to the time that has elapsed since the following pages were
written for the _Ave Maria_--by the kindness of whose editor they are
reprinted now--it is impossible for me to verify the spelling of all the
names that occur in the course of the narrative. I made notes while at
Lourdes, and from those notes wrote my account; it is therefore
extremely probable that small errors of spelling may have crept in,
which I am now unable to correct.
ROBERT HUGH BENSON.
_Church of our Lady of Lourdes,
New York,
Lent, 1914_
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
THE BASILICA. FRONT VIEW _Frontispiece_
DR. BOISSARIE _to face p._ 16
BUREAU DES CONSTATATIONS " 26
THE GROTTO IN 1858 " 36
THE GROTTO IN 1914 " 46
THE BLESSING OF THE SICK " 56
THE BASILICA. SIDE VIEW " 66
BERNADETTE " 78
I.
The first sign of our approach to Lourdes was a vast wooden cross,
crowning a pointed hill. We had been travelling all day, through the
August sunlight, humming along the straight French roads beneath the
endless avenues; now across a rich plain, with the road banked on either
side to avert the spring torrents from the Pyrenees; now again mounting
and descending a sudden shoulder of hill. A few minutes ago we had
passed into Tarbes, the cathedral city of the diocese in which Lourdes
lies; and there, owing to a little accident, we had been obliged to
halt, while the wheels of the car were lifted, with incredible
ingenuity, from the deep gutter into which the chauffeur had, with the
best intentions, steered them. It was here, in the black eyes, the
dominant profiles, the bright colours, the absorbed childish interest of
the crowd, in their comments, their laughter, their seriousness, and
their accent, that the South showed itself almost unmixed. It was
market-day in Tarbes; and when once more we were on our way, we still
went slowly; passing, almost all the way into Lourdes itself, a
long-drawn procession--carts and foot passengers, oxen, horses, dogs,
and children--drawing nearer every minute toward that ring of solemn
blue hills that barred the view to Spain.
It is difficult to describe with what sensations I came to Lourdes. As a
Christian man, I did not dare to deny that miracles happened; as a
reasonably humble man, I did not dare to deny that they happened at
Lourdes; yet, I suppose, my attitude even up to now had been that of a
reverent agnostic--the attitude, in fact, of a majority of Christians on
this particular point--Christians, that is, who resemble the Apostle
Thomas in his less agreeable aspect. I had heard and read a good deal
about psychology, about the effect of mind on matter and of nerves on
tissue; I had reflected upon the infection of an ardent crowd; I had
read Zola's dishonest book;[1] and these things, coupled with the
extreme difficulty which the imagination finds in realizing what it has
never experienced--since, after all, miracles are confessedly
miraculous, and therefore unusual--the effect of all this was to render
my mental state a singularly detached one. I believed? Yes, I suppose
so; but it was a halting act of faith pure and simple; it was not yet
either sight or real conviction.
The cross, then, was the first glimpse of Lourdes' presence; and ten
minutes later we were in the town itself.
Lourdes is not beautiful, though it must once have been. It was once a
little Franco-Spanish town, set in the lap of the hills, with a swift,
broad, shallow stream, the Gave, flowing beneath it. It is now
cosmopolitan, and therefore undistinguished. As we passed slowly through
the crowded streets--for the National Pilgrimage was but now
arriving--we saw endless rows of shops and booths sheltering beneath
tall white blank houses, as correct and as expressionless as a
brainless, well-bred man. Here and there we passed a great hotel. The
crowd about our wheels was almost as cosmopolitan as a Roman crowd. It
was largely French, as that is largely Italian; but the Spaniards were
there, vivid-faced men and women, severe Britons, solemn Teutons; and, I
have no doubt, Italians, Belgians, Flemish and Austrians as well. At
least I heard during my three days' stay all the languages that I could
recognize, and many that I could not. There were many motor-cars there
besides our own, carriages, carts, bell-clanging trams, and the litters
of the sick. Presently we dismounted in a side street, and set out to
walk to the Grotto, through the hot evening sunshine.
The first sign of sanctity that we saw, as we came out at the end of a
street, was the mass of churches built on the rising ground above the
river. Imagine first a great oval of open ground, perhaps two hundred by
three hundred yards in area, crowded now with groups as busy as ants,
partly embraced by two long white curving arms of masonry rising
steadily to their junction; at the point on this side where the ends
should meet if they were prolonged, stands a white stone image of Our
Lady upon a pedestal, crowned, and half surrounded from beneath by some
kind of metallic garland arching upward. At the farther end the two
curves of masonry of which I have spoken, rising all the way by steps,
meet upon a terrace. This terrace is, so to speak, the centre of gravity
of the whole.
For just above it stands the flattened dome of the Rosary Church, of
which the doors are beneath the terrace, placed upon broad flights of
steps. Immediately above the dome is the entrance to the crypt of the
basilica; and, above that again, reached by further flights of steps,
are the doors of the basilica; and, above it, the roof of the church
itself, with its soaring white spire high over all.
Let me be frank. These buildings are not really beautiful. They are
enormous, but they are not impressive; they are elaborate and fine and
white, but they are not graceful. I am not sure what is the matter with
them; but I think it is that they appear to be turned out of a machine.
They are too trim; they are like a well-dressed man who is not quite a
gentleman; they are like a wedding guest; they are _haute-bourgeoise_,
they are not the nobility. It is a terrible pity, but I suppose it could
not be helped, since they were allowed so little time to grow. There is
no sense of reflectiveness about them, no patient growth of character,
as in those glorious cathedrals, Amiens, Chartres, Beauvais, which I had
so lately seen. There is nothing in reserve; they say everything, they
suggest nothing. They have no imaginative vista.
We said not one word to one another. We threaded our way across the
ground, diagonally, seeing as we went the Bureau de Constatations (or
the office where the doctors sit), contrived near the left arm of the
terraced steps; and passed out under the archway, to find ourselves with
the churches on our left, and on our right the flowing Gave, confined on
this side by a terraced walk, with broad fields beyond the stream.
The first thing I noticed were the three roofs of the _piscines_, on the
left side of the road, built under the cliff on which the churches
stand. I shall have more to say of them presently, but now it is enough
to remark that they resemble three little chapels, joined in one, each
with its own doorway; an open paved space lies across the entrances,
where the doctors and the priests attend upon the sick. This open space
is fenced in all about, to keep out the crowd that perpetually seethes
there. We went a few steps farther, worked our way in among the people,
and fell on our knees.
Overhead, the cliff towered up, bare hanging rock beneath, grass and
soaring trees above; and at the foot of the cliff a tall, irregular
cave. There are two openings of this cave; the one, the larger, is like
a cage of railings, with the gleam of an altar in the gloom beyond, a
hundred burning candles, and sheaves and stacks of crutches clinging to
the broken roofs of rock; the other, and smaller, and that farther from
us, is an opening in the cliff, shaped somewhat like a _vesica_. The
grass still grows there, with ferns and the famous climbing shrub; and
within the entrance, framed in it, stands Mary, in white and blue, as
she stood fifty years ago, raised perhaps twenty feet above the ground.
Ah, that image!... I said, "As she stood there!" Yet it could not have
been so; for surely even simple Bernadette would not have fallen on her
knees. It is too white, it is too blue; it is, like the three churches,
placed magnificently, yet not impressive; fine and slender, yet not
graceful.
But we knelt there without unreality, with the river running swift
behind us; for we knelt where a holy child had once knelt before a
radiant vision, and with even more reason; for even if the one, as some
say, had been an hallucination, were those sick folk an hallucination?
Was Pierre de Rudder's mended leg an hallucination, or the healed wounds
of Marie Borel? Or were those hundreds upon hundreds of disused crutches
an illusion? Did subjectivity create all these? If so, what greater
miracle can be demanded?
And there was more than that. For when later, at Argelès, I looked over
the day, I was able to formulate for the first time the extraordinary
impressions that Lourdes had given me. There was everything hostile to
my peace--an incalculable crowd, an oppressive heat, dust, noise,
weariness; there was the disappointment of the churches and the image;
there was the sour unfamiliarity of the place and the experience; and
yet I was neither troubled nor depressed nor irritated nor disappointed.
It appeared to me as if some great benign influence were abroad,
soothing and satisfying; lying like a great summer air over all, to
quiet and to stimulate. I cannot describe this further; I can only say
that it never really left me during those three days, I saw sights that
would have saddened me elsewhere--apparent injustices, certain
disappointments, dashed hopes that would almost have broken my heart;
and yet that great Power was over all, to reconcile, to quiet and to
reassure. To leave Lourdes at the end was like leaving home.
After a few minutes before the Grotto, we climbed the hill behind, made
an appointment for my Mass on the morrow; and, taking the car again,
moved slowly through the crowded streets, and swiftly along the country
roads, up to Argelès, nearly a dozen miles away.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The epithet is deliberate. He relates in his book, "Lourdes," the
story of an imaginary case of a girl, suffering from tuberculosis, who
goes to Lourdes as a pilgrim, and is, apparently, cured of her disease.
It breaks out, however, again during her return home; and the case would
appear therefore to be one of those in which, owing to fierce excitement
and the mere power of suggestion, there is a temporary amelioration, but
no permanent, or supernatural, cure. Will it be believed that the
details of this story, all of which are related with great
particularity, and observed by Zola himself, were taken from an actual
case that occurred during one of his visits--all the details except the
relapse? There was no relapse: the cure was complete and permanent. When
Dr. Boissarie later questioned the author as to the honesty of this
literary device, saying that he had understood him to have stated that
he had come to Lourdes for the purpose of an impartial investigation,
Zola answered that the characters in the book were his own, and that he
could make them do what he liked. It is on these principles that the
book is constructed. It must be added that Zola followed up the case,
and had communications with the _miraculée_ long after her cure had been
shown to be permanent, and before his book appeared.
II.
We were in Lourdes again next morning a little after six o'clock; and
already it might have been high noon, for the streets were one moving
mass of pilgrims. From every corner came gusts of singing; and here and
there through the crowd already moved the _brancardiers_--men of every
nation with shoulder-straps and cross--bearing the litters with their
piteous burdens.
I was to say Mass in the crypt; and when I arrived there at last, the
church was full from end to end. The interior was not so disappointing
as I had feared. It had a certain solid catacombic gloom beneath its low
curved roof, which, if it had not been for the colours and some of the
details, might very nearly have come from the hand of a good architect.
The arrangements for the pilgrims were as bad as possible; there was no
order, no marshalling; they moved crowd against crowd like herds of
bewildered sheep. Some were for Communion, some for Mass only, some for
confession; and they pushed patiently this way and that in every
direction. It was a struggle before I got my vestments; I produced a
letter from the Bishop of Rodez, with whom I had lunched a few days
before; I argued, I deprecated, I persuaded, I quoted. Everything once
more was against my peace of mind; yet I have seldom said Mass with more
consolations than in that tiny sanctuary of the high Altar.... An
ecclesiastic served, and an old priest knelt devoutly at a prie-Dieu.
When the time for Communion came, I turned about and saw but one sea of
faces stretching from the altar rail into as much of the darkness as I
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