What I Owe to Lourdes
René Schwob (1895–1946) was a French Jew who converted to the Catholic Faith at the age of 30. While a soldier in WWI, he had received a signal grace. As he lay on the battlefield seriously wounded he heard a voice tell him “You will be saved if you love me.” He always remembered this voice but fled, becoming a merchant mariner and art critic, and traveling the world. He was received into the Church in 1926, an event which marked the beginning of a spiritual journey that he chronicled in a series of books including Itinerary of a Jew towards the Church, from which the following passage is taken.
I would like to reflect upon a story you already know quite well. More authoritative lips than mine have already told it. And if I were to do nothing more than repeat it, I should have only to keep quiet. But I would like to present it under the aspect of the drama as it appears to my eyes, emphasizing the benefits which my experience as a convert owes it.
An Affront to the Age of Enlightenment
The two main personages are the Virgin and Bernadette. We are the third. We are the crowd, the successor of the crowds to which, in the beginning, in 1858, a bishop, a curé, a prefect and his acolytes, and a policeman, served as coryphaeus. One might say that then there were two demi-choruses. One was that of the incredulous. And these personages lent it their diverse voices: Can you believe it? What a scandal! A little shepherdess saying she’s in touch with heaven. A stop must be put to it at once.
The curé took that duty upon himself at first. It was his role. He fulfilled it. But Bernadette persisted. The bishop, silent until then, had to get involved. As for the prefect and the policeman, it went without saying that they would belong to the party of common sense, the party of public order and good government. That is why it wouldn’t have been necessary even to mention them, had not the policeman of whom I am thinking made a reflection about the alleged apparitions of the Virgin and the trusting, ever increasing crowd that is all the more noteworthy in that it seems to me symbolic: “Isn’t it unfortunate,” he said, “to see this kind of thing in the 19th century.”
These visionary’s tales seemed to him to be an affront to “the Age of Enlightenment.” But this comment betrays a certain pomposity so peculiar to our time...that it seems like a perfect touch in the mouth of this defender of society. Condemned to what we can see or touch, today we are facing an insurmountable doubt in what privileged souls may from time to time perceive. And, at bottom, our policeman was right: it is stupefying, in this self-satisfied century, that God can still find a way to come down to us.
Bernadette
The other demi-chorus was that of the souls who do not shut out the word of God: a demi-chorus that was gradually to become the whole of Catholic Christendom. At first it comprised a few good women. It rarely happened that someone or other, a doctor less blind than his colleagues or a mother who dared to plunge her dying child in the icy water—and the Virgin restored it to life—rarely did it happen, I repeat, that one or two protagonists dared to detach themselves publicly from this anonymous demi-chorus to express their conviction.
You see how the drama was divided and in what it consisted. It was divided between heaven and earth. It involved knowing whether heaven had really spoken to earth or if, on the contrary, Bernadette was insane, or a prankster, or just someone who was making fun of people... Of the twenty thousand people who eventually gathered round her, it is true that none ever saw the beautiful Lady who appeared to her, to her alone, in broad daylight, who spoke to her, said the Rosary with her; nor had anyone heard anything whatsoever. But there was Bernadette, and they could contemplate her during her ecstasy. She was a girl of great good sense; a serious, disinterested girl who would soon bury herself in the silence of the cloister and suffer until her death, according to the promises of the Grotto. For, indeed, the Lady had promised her nothing but prolonged suffering while awaiting eternal beatitude. She had promised her nothing of good for her life on earth; and poor Bernadette, daughter of poverty, would never accept the least reward offered her by importunate admirers for touching their rosaries with her fingers.
With a lucidity, simplicity, and playfulness worthy of Joan of Arc, the little shepherd of the Pyrenees never deviated from her initial assertions. The vocation of this confidante of the Blessed Virgin, whose immaculate conception had just been defined a few years before, was to be steadfast. It seems that her role, besides the acceptance of suffering, was to serve as a heavenly witness to the infallibility of the head of the Church, proving at the same time that this Church was truly the Church of Truth....
We know whose daughter Bernadette was. People are tempted to repeat concerning her what the Jews already said when the apostles presented them the carpenter’s son. They knew good and well that “nothing good can come from Nazareth.” Bernadette’s family, too, was despised. It may even be that the father had to steal some wood for heating. As for her, she just knew her dialect. She was scarcely fit for tending sheep. But she was of an extraordinary purity. And all day long she recited the Angelic Salutation.
It was this ignorant child, this shepherdess whom the right-thinking people of the town certainly despised; it was this little peasant, lively and with a quick repartee, of an unschooled but upright and pure intelligence, whom the Blessed Virgin sought out at the foot of the Pyrenees, just as the Holy Ghost had sought her one day in the midst of a remote village, the most maligned of all Galilee. The parallel should not be pushed too far. But still, it may well be said that, for the greatest heavenly revelation in modern times, Heaven chose a soul of a quality very near to that of the Mother of Christ since, of her only one thing is know, namely that she was “the handmaid of the Lord.” And that would suffice for her glory for all the following centuries.
Do not be surprised that I take Bernadette’s side passionately. One scarcely thinks of her when speaking of Lourdes. And yet, if Bernadette had not been Bernadette, Lourdes would not have become the rendezvous of the Christian universe. Such is the importance of a soul in God’s eyes. Bernadette alone revealed Lourdes to us. But she is also one of those whom we must closely question if we desire to penetrate the mysterious domain where heaven is reflected.
What Bernadette reveals to us is the indubitable reality of this interior universe that escapes our measurements, where our grandeurs are little, where our weaknesses are strong, and where it is impossible to refute with the arguments we make use of in our everyday exchanges.
It would not take much pressure to make me say that, even more than Bernadette giving us Lourdes, it is Bernadette that Lourdes gives us, our mystery through hers; that is to say: the proximity, the incredible closeness of the human soul and heaven. This is what must never be forgotten. And, moreover, this is what we feel when we are at the Grotto. Yes, it is in this sense that the graces of place are at work at Lourdes. Elsewhere, in other places of pilgrimage, one goes to venerate a relic, or to see the body of a saint; or else, at Rome, it’s the whole history of the Church. One follows along step by step and suddenly one is standing before a human form in the person of the pope, whose blessing justifies our journey. Lourdes is nothing like that; Bernadette’s body is not even there. And I might add that at Nevers I felt no emotion before her. That is because the reality of Bernadette is of the same order as that of Lourdes; they have no need of a visible form. No outward form lends them support. Their reality is that of the soul restored, reduced to its purity.
But the wonder, the point at which one discerns God amusing Himself with us, with what fatherly teasing He consents to treat our misery and blindness, is that this invisible reality—the true revelation of Lourdes—is offered to us at Lourdes in the healing of bodies.
Perhaps if the testimony of these cures had not been granted us, had we not plunged deep into such a palpable marvel at Lourdes, we would not go there. A simple pilgrimage to the reality of the invisible would not be enough to set us on the road even if it concerns us so directly. What is needed is just the opposite of that by which Lourdes is Lourdes; there has to be the attraction of a promise, of suffering assuaged. And it is also in this regard that Lourdes was for me of such great help; I grasped in its reality the reflection of these contradictions of which the Gospel is full and of which the Christian life is made. That is because Catholicism is a living doctrine whose opposing precepts are presented at one and the same time. It has the suppleness of life, and likewise, Lourdes is the pilgrimage to the source of life; to the interior source that denies the flesh and at the same time heals it....
From Consternation to Conversion
...I share these confidences with you in the hope of deepening your confidence in the Virgin.
I believe my difficulties in this regard especially arose from my imperfect conception of the mesh between heaven and earth. On the one hand, I believed in heaven. On the other, I was only too well obliged to believe in earth. But between the two, there seemed no other communication than prayer, the efficacy of which I did not believe. For you who have no doubt been brought up in the Catholic faith, such a separation between nature and the supernatural must seem strange. But considering that I came from total incredulity, that I received baptism and began to communicate not only without believing the in Real Presence and scarcely believing in more than a pantheistic God extended throughout nature and identical with it and, precisely because of this, blind and deaf to prayer and deprived of all personal life, you may appreciate some of the difficulties which continued to occupy me and to keep me from any real faith in a permanent commerce between heaven and earth long after I had finally received the stroke of grace and could no longer doubt the God of Revelation.
The Blessed Virgin and the other saints at first seemed to me like charming characters: my ambition set them before me as models to imitate but not as intercessors whom we could implore to come to our aid. At bottom, I had really come to believe in God, but in a God less occupied with us than with Himself. I did not really believe in His paternity over us. I even wonder if in some measure I believed, not in the reality—I believed with all my might—but in the immortality of the soul. And all these difficulties, presented to my mind under the guise of an edifying humility, ultimately amounted to the monstrous pride of one who submits only to his own reason for judging of realities which it cannot embrace alone and which it cannot know save by submitting itself to Tradition.
Without ceasing to have a profound faith in all the dogmas of the Church, I did not really accept anything in this Tradition that did not suit my old habits of involuntary rationalism and spontaneous incredulity. My skepticism regarding the inhabitation of the invisible world by saints capable of hearing us and of praying for us to a God who grants our prayers was supported by the fact that, despite my new faith, I dragged behind me the baggage of the after-effects of the moral miseries of which I had not succeeded in divesting myself; and it seemed to me that had my prayers been heard by powerful personages, I should have already been long delivered from the evil I detested but which continued to cling to me. This time it was not beneath the guise of humility that my pride disguised itself, but beneath that of a desire for an unattainable purity; that is, beneath the guise of a too impatient desire of a very high perfection. And this pride, lulling my weak will, would have led me quickly to despair in order to keep me from a perseverance that bore such little fruit, and from a God who listened to me so little.
Without a doubt, the devil was not far from my unreasonable expectations for which I reproached heaven. Mercifully, the sacraments, to which I never failed to have recourse, kept me from this despair for a long time before I could finally admit the intercessory power of the saints. But just as I do not wish to give a sermon, neither do I intend to recount all the steps of my spiritual itinerary. I simply had to make known my objections to the invisible world in order to show how important Lourdes was to me, when, despite all the interior faults that I had been able to keep within me, I discovered, thanks to Lourdes, that communication indeed had been established between nature and the supernatural. And that there were not so many frontiers to cross to pass from earth to heaven.
At the same time, the Blessed Virgin seemed so close, so attentive, so maternal, that it became more difficult for me to doubt her power than it had been for me till then to believe in it. Yes, such was, on the supernatural plane, the greatest benefit of Lourdes, for which the example given by Bernadette would not have sufficed. For if Bernadette had shown me that heaven opens to the pure soul, the action of the Virgin was really necessary to prove to me that she dwelt in heaven and that she looked after us. Without this action, I could have continued to believe in Bernadette’s vision, but this would not have affected my deep, unexamined conviction that, in the course of life, the separation between the two worlds remained absolute. Heaven would have in some way seemed to me reserved for ecstasies. And I have never doubted that. But as to the reality of the supernatural world, as regards its permeability to our prayers, as regards the interest it might have in our human acts, without the Virgin of Lourdes I would have continued to offer it the denial of an incredulity in good faith, but absolute.
You can see that physical miracles are not always ineffectual for the enlightenment and conversion of a soul. And yet these miracles, as useful as they were to me, would not have been enough had I not betaken myself to the very presence of the Virgin....
The Sick of Lourdes Offered by Mary
The Virgin, Bernadette: henceforth these are invisible realities, and all souls turn to them. But now at Lourdes there only remains this other grand personage composed of those who sing and those who suffer: the active and the immobile. And the soul of these personages is constituted by the sick. In the revelations of the Blessed Virgin there had never been any mention of the sick. She never said it was the sick, but rather sinners whom she wished to gather round her to heal them. They came because the rumor of sensational cures spread far and wide; and also because the essence of every pilgrimage is the apparent cure that bears witness to the hidden cures. But never had the like been seen. And the sick flocked in such numbers that henceforth it was around them that pilgrimages were organized. Lourdes, the City of Ave’s, is the city of the sick. Their sufferings accepted and offered have become its silent, deepest prayer. Lourdes is ever after the city of suffering joyously consented to. And it is by this detour of happy suffering that we rejoin the exhortations of the Virgin when she reminded Bernadette of the urgent need for penance.
Endured by the sick, assumed by the stretcher-bearers and nurses, expressed by this immense multitude who offer them the help of their toil and compassion, it is henceforth between these complementary pains, between these two demi-choruses of this unique personage, with priests for coryphaeus, that the tragedy is played. And in the background I often seem to see the whole earth in commotion. All those they have left behind and for whom they suffer and pray. All those who are so far from suspecting that it is, in part, to all this suffering on the move that the impiety of men is indebted for being able to continue its history. The purpose of suffering, its eminent role in the working of days, it is at Lourdes that one discerns it. And I admit that despite my own sufferings and the vigor of my faith, the attention shown to this suffering, this display that seems to be made of it at Lourdes, was for me objectionable and even, I must say, repugnant.
What especially shocked me was that they came to Lourdes to ask for favors. The esplanade of the Basilica dotted with constellations of supplicants stretched out on their backs looked too much like a market for my liking. All these people, I would say to myself, have only come there to display their wounds to the Blessed Virgin, to get some grace. I shall sum up what I experienced by saying that this display of deformed flesh provoked in me an insurmountable disgust at the sight of so much fallen humanity. But, what’s more, I also felt a sense of wounded modesty. It seemed inconceivable to me to undertake a pilgrimage for the purpose of invoking the favor of a hypothetical attention from heaven. It seemed to me that in this exhibition of all these infirmities there was an unjustifiable appeal to the good pleasure of whom I did not quite know, to a kind of heavenly favoritism by which I was the more irritated as I did not believe in it.
For understanding Lourdes, I lacked a bit of brotherly love; also, undoubtedly, I had not yet verified myself the possibility of miracles. And then, most of all, I had lacked the opportunity to receive the confidences of some of the sick.
It was thanks to the visits I paid to a good number of them that I had to relent. I recall in particular having accompanied a doctor on a walk through a northbound train carrying all kinds of seriously ill people back home. They were going to be making the same long journey in the opposite direction, and this time without being sustained by the hope of a cure, which they had had to leave before the Grotto. During the four days of their pilgrimage they had been subjected to all the trials: they were plunged in icy water, they had stayed for hours under the sun to pray—and all in vain. Now they were leaving worn out by so many efforts to which the transfer back to the train cars was soon to be added. I expected revolts and murmurs; without exaggeration, this piteous crowd was happy. I did not find a single sick person who complained. Their passage to Lourdes, the emotion of having felt around them so much fraternal charity on the part of those who had unflaggingly looked after them—all of that had been sufficient to allay their distress and allow them to bear it better. And even before having seen or spoken with the miraculously cured, I was forced to yield to the overwhelming evidence: the pilgrimage to Lourdes is miraculous for all hearts without exception.
I will not quote you the particularly touching words I heard from the lips of the simplest folk; I report several in Capitale de la Prière. They are all admirable. But what I want to tell you is that none of these sick people had come to Lourdes to ask to be cured; they had at heart the cure or conversion of someone else as much as their own health. All these unfortunates, yet they prayed for one another much more than each for himself. And I assure you that there was no pretense of disinterestedness in their answers. With this simplicity, which is the virtue of Lourdes, they let us glimpse the treasure of a generosity that was not even conscious of its own beauty.
It was then that I understood this assembly of all the physical miseries, this “court of miracles” where you have to have a strong heart to be able to stay for long, which is at first so disconcerting. The Virgin, by the cures she works from time to time, but especially by the love and joy she spreads indistinctly in a shower of continuous graces, testifies to her desire to have the constant spectacle of so many sufferings accepted in the place chosen by her. Beneath her eyes, it is, as it were, the foundation of the Mystical Body upon which is built this suffering Church of which she has the care and which she offers at Lourdes in a unique and continuous holocaust. It is like “the army arrayed in battle” of which Scripture speaks and with which she herself blends. Without the gathering mustered on the banks of the River Gave, where would be the witness of her vigilance, the guarantee of her maternity extended to all the earth? She would have to intervene everywhere at once. But here it is all the peoples who flock to her and mingle at her feet. And their unanimous joy shows the measure of her grace. In truth, even though she never spoke of it to Bernadette, when questioning the sick at Lourdes one understands at last that it is they who give the most thanks to God, and Lourdes indeed would be nothing if their presence were lacking.
The fervor imparted to these hearts, which will be such a great help to them in the hard months ahead, is a light they carry to others; it is the fervor of the prayer they will henceforth raise in union with the prayer of their long sufferings. I say this because now I know it: Lourdes cannot be judged on appearances; no one should ever judge Lourdes so long as he has not conversed with some of the sick who have come there to offer their suffering. It is through them that the splendor of Lourdes shines.
The Sick and the Procession of the Blessed Sacrament
In a well-regulated order, like a slow, monotonous ballet, people from all over the world come to blend their prayers and offer them to God in their midst, who blesses them. Then is truly the triumph of Christ in His Eucharist. All the hierarchy at Lourdes participate. It is the high point of the whole day. And when, in its turn, the Host leaves the cortege preceding it and the crowd following for the blessing of the sick, it dawns on the viewer that this is what the Blessed Virgin had in mind when she told Bernadette that she wanted people to come to Lourdes in procession. Even more than seeing at her feet all her people gathered together before her, it was so that her Son might be brought near all the suffering of the earth; it was perhaps especially to enable all the sorrows of the earth to come and confront the suffering of her Son.
The unity of earth affirmed in suffering, but in a suffering that is surmounted to be transformed into joy at the feet of God who blesses it: I ask you whether a similar office, such an overwhelming rite, can be accomplished anywhere else in the word?
It is in this evening Credo, this midday Benediction, that Lourdes’ reason of being is rooted, that the life of the pilgrimage reaches fulfillment. And I have never found anywhere, not at Jerusalem, not at Rome, a revelation more full of Catholic truth. The revelations of the city of the servant of the servants and the revelations of the Holy Land are different. They yield us nothing more essential than this intimacy with the Eucharist, where the little Jewish Virgin become the Mother of the human race wanted all the human race to reunite.
But it really seems that it was us, who are living at present such a tragic epoch, that the Virgin foresaw, us who must contemplate in their utmost effects the jealousy, egotism, and hatred of a world separated from God and condemned to division against Him. Confronted by the self-destructive clashes of peoples, classes, and races, the Virgin of Lourdes, whose insignificance we once believed we could descry, tirelessly exhorts us to prayer and to the love of reciprocal sacrifice. Such is the highest, the most urgent lesson of Lourdes: that we must have recourse unceasingly to the power of the Rosary against the forces of evil. What Lourdes teaches us, in short, is fraternal charity, trust, simplicity, and, from the depth of our sufferings, the joy of the Virgin in her first mysteries.
Current Issue
