The Song of Bernadette

For this writer who often enough has the wrong priorities, the story of the week wasn’t the spectacular kick-off of the Olympics in Athens, with 10,000 athletes participating including our doughty 16 – nor the doping suspicions which may knock two of Greece’s own Olympians out of the arena.

Nor was it the "Smokey Mountain" controversy whipped up – possibly with good reason – by Typhoon Miriam.

It is the 150th anniversary of Pope Pius IX’s declaration of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary which is now being celebrated in Lourdes, beginning last Saturday. Pope John Paul II went there himself, not merely as a Pontiff but as a pilgrim – not to pray for himself (nor for his own debilitating illness to be cured – but to commemorate the miracle in which the Virgin Mary appeared to a young and tiny peasant girl, Bernadette Soubirous, and finally identified herself: "Je suis l’Immaculée Conception" (I am the Immaculate Conception).

The first apparition occurred on February 11, 1958, in a muddy grotto in the small Pyrenean town of Lourdes in southern France. Fourteen-year-old Bernadette had gone with her sister and a friend to collect wood from the forest and driftwood from the river for their mother’s cooking.

The two sturdier girls had crossed the river, but the ailing Bernadette hung behind. Then she heard a wind, next saw a soft light coming from a niche in the Grotto, then "a beautiful smiling child in white . . . seemed to beckon to her. She was startled and instinctively reached for her Rosary but was unable to pick it up until the child produced one herself and began to make the sign of the cross, then she watched until the girl disappeared."

In those words, Oxford Fellow and Tutor in Modern History Ruth Harris in her book, Lourdes, describes the first of 18 apparitions which were to affect, through the devotion of little Bernadette Soubirous, the lives of many millions.

It was on the skeptical urging of the parish priest, Abbé Peyramale, who angrily doubted the narration of this poor, unlettered peasant girl, that she determine the identity of the apparition: "Tu demanderas son nom a cette Dame!" (Ask the Lady her name.)

Bernadette was not welcomed, but condemned by many in the Church for bearing testament to those weird apparitions, first of a child, then of a shining Lady. The townfolk, other priests, and local authorities, not just Abbé Peyramale, wanted the Lady identified. Bernadette had not planned to go to the Grotto that day, but on the night of the 24th March, the evening before the Feast of the Annunciation, she awoke, with an urge to return to it. At 5 a.m. she arrived, to find the Police Commissioner Jacomet, one of her early detractors, already waiting there for her.

Then the "girl in white" appeared. Bernadette pressed her to say who she was. After Bernadette repeated the query four times, the girl put her hands together, looked heavenwards, and said in the local dialect: "Que soy era Immaculada Concepciou." (I am the Immaculate Conception).

Bernadette was subjected to insult and humiliation as a result of her having "seen" such apparitions. Her mother slapped her for her early account of them. The mother superior at her school upbraided her and ordered her to stop those stupid pranks of hers. Important women scolded her. The above-mentioned Police Chief Jacomet derided her. The parish priest denounced her as an unlikely vehicle for the transmission of Divine messages.

For years, even after she had entered a Convent to become a nun, embracing the lowliest tasks in the congregation, her detractors attacked and spat at her.

But, as Harris so well puts it: "Those who doubted her were met with an unyielding persistence; observers were repeatedly struck by the way such an ignorant and seemingly slow-witted child answered difficult questions with spirit and often canny peasant humor. Nor did she succumb to other entrapment; although frequently offered tempting presents, ranging from a fresh apple to a golden Rosary, she politely but firmly refused everything in a fashion her abject poverty made extraordinary. Instead she promised to pray for her well-wishers at the Grotto and act as a mouthpiece for the entreaties of others. It was on the shoulders of this girl, seemingly so simple and yet so strong, that the wondrous burden of the apparitions fell."

Why do so many of us love Bernadette Soubirous? For her simple faith. Her steadfastness. It is not that when she died, her entombed body, attired in her humble nun’s robes, remained uncorrupted. Nor that, at long last, owing to many miracles at the Shrine, she was vindicated long after death and declared a Saint by the same Church which had doubted and tormented her.

It is because this little shepherd girl teaches us, in our nation’s hour of self-doubt, that, truly, faith can still move mountains, and that love overcomes all.

* * *

For years I’ve been trying to find a VHS or DVD of a wonderful movie starring Jennifer Jones, without success.

It was called The Song of Bernadette, based on a luminous book of Franz Werfel of the same name. I think the movie was made by Jennifer Jones’ husband, director and producer David O. Selznick – but I find no copies extant, though I’ve searched for it as far afield as the US and Europe. Jennifer, of course, was too tall to have played Bernadette, but in that role she was magnificent. (The real saint was smaller than GMA.)

As for the book which inspired the film, there hangs a tale. The Viennesse novelist, a Jew fleeing Nazi persecution, Franz Werfel managed to reach Lourdes, and was concealed in the sanctuary there, until he secured passage to freedom in America.

Werfel vowed to write The Song of Bernadette in gratitude for his deliverance in that hour of peril.

In her epilogue, Harris expresses it most eloquently: "It was her simplicity (Bernadette’s) that attracted Henri Lasserre and led him to construct a story of Lourdes that seized the imagination of millions. The same qualities led Werfel to sing the song of Bernadette and attracted Hollywood to turn his book into a movie. For, despite the attempts by some to romanticize, by others to politicize and by more still to medicalize, throughout the history of Lourdes there has always remained one fixed point: the essential image of a young, poverty-stricken and sickly girl kneeling in ecstasy in a muddy grotto."

Werfel, in the frontispiece of his book, wrote of his story of Bernadette and the miracles of the Grotto: "To those who do not believe, no explanation is possible; to those who believe, no explanation is necessary."

This brings to mind, too, a quotation dredged up from boyhood memory from G.K. Chesterton: "The foolish things of the world hath God chosen that they may confound the wise."

* * *

Not everything is miraculous at Lourdes.

In 1978, my former partner, Dr. Ricky Soler, drove there in a hired SEAT (the Spanish version of Fiat), crossing from Pamplona, through Biarritz, in a sudden fit of piety, to Lourdes. When he got to the Shrine, he was warned by signs in three languages, "Beware of pickpockets".

Crafty Ricky decided to outwit the thieves by locking up all his money in the glove compartment of his car – US $3,000 and several thousand Spanish pesetas. He then went over to the Grotto and (he claims) prayed devoutly. When he returned to his vehicle 15 minutes later, he climbed in and started to drive off. He reached into his glove compartment for his pack of cigarettes – and to his horror, it swung open. Not a single blessed dollar or peseta was left in there!

He rushed over to the nearest police station and tried to explain to a bored-looking gendarme at the desk the terrible thing that had happened to him. He struggled through his complaint in English, Spanish, and . . . scrambled French. The police officer shoved some forms at him, indicating that he should fill them up. When Soler had accomplished the forms, the gendarme simply sat back with a woeful expressions of deepest Gallic ennui on his face – and did nothing.

Soler was frantic. He wanted to know why the cop wasn’t dashing out to his car to check for fingerprints, or perhaps take photos of the plundered vehicle.

A woman and her husband nearby, who luckily spoke Spanish, queried the gendarme for Ricky on this score. The gendarme shrugged wearily: "Tell the gentleman that he mustn’t feel so special. His is only the 97th theft reported this morning – and it’s not even noon yet." However, Soler swears today – he still has, well, faith.

Our own experience was completely different. Precious and this writer went down by the TGV, the super-swift train from Paris. My wife had been to Lourdes twice before. This was my first "try". I was facing a major, life-threatening operation. Nothing prompts devotion as urgently as that. And surprisingly, visiting that Shrine, praying to Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, beseeching St. Bernadette for strength and comfort – drinking the miraculous water from taps arranged everywhere (free – a balm to the Saluyot soul) – nothing more in life seemed daunting. Why, they even dipped me in that ice-cold pool, and I came out bone-dry, my teeth not even chattering. God must love sinners, for He – through the intercession of our Mother and St. Bernadette – seemed to say to me, fear not.

And nobody picked my pocket.

God truly answers all our prayers. Perhaps not always in the way we want them answered. A pilgrimage to Lourdes does not heal everybody of affliction. Yet, through some alchemy, I believe, the pilgrim’s life is changed.

Those who claims to have been rewarded with a miracle are always – yes, invariably – deemed conceited. So, I skittishly make no such claim. Yet the peace of that Grotto in Lourdes, and the Song of Bernadette will forever remain one of the most moving and unforgettable experiences of this journeyman’s life.