The Desecration of Lourdes
February 11, 2025
TWO posts from 2017, here and here, examine some of the desecration of Lourdes, France, by the Vatican II Church, which insists on humanistic fun and fellowship over sublimity, awe and reverence.
I especially recommend these perceptive comments by a reader — and, by the way, I have included another photo of St. Bernadette in this post because I think her face speaks volumes about her interior state. It reveals the conviction and simplicity that enabled this uneducated girl to resist everyone around her — her parents, her teachers, the police and all the most smart people of her day. This same solemnity helped her turn away later from the status of a celebrity and endure illness. She was even more beautiful in death.
From the reader’s comments:
The clip you feature with its prancing priests trying to be all things to all men by placing fun and frivolity and childishness at the heart of what is afterall an event personally commanded by Our Lady, (“Go, tell the priests to come here in procession and to build a chapel here” – March 2nd, 1858), is at odds with the reality of what happened at Lourdes in 1858. How so?
Consider that Our Lady took care to appear arrayed in very dignified garb. Her manner of speaking to Bernadette was always dignified and courteous and formal.
Consider that Bernadette was but a child herself in 1858 but Our Lady nevertheless made no concession to childishness by seeking to indulge or amuse her. On the contrary she granted Bernadette the compliment of addressing her as a young woman – with agency. Indeed, it is important that on her first few appearances nothing at all was said but instead they prayed together silently honoring God through the rosary.
Consider how early on Our Lady elects to eschew the various informal forms of address she might have used to Bernadette and which would have been justified by both Bernadette’s youth and low social rank and instead opts for the dignified and extremely courteous address: “would you do me the kindness” of returning over the fortnight. In the same vein, Our Lady chose not to sugar coat her message to Bernadette but to treat her as an adult by bluntly informing her: “I do not promise to make you happy in this world but in the other” .
Likewise, there is nothing fun or trivial or light-hearted (I like your term “goofy”), in the rather harsh actions Our Lady commands of Bernadette – all of which to many Catholic thinkers evoke the symbolism of the prophet Isaiah’s “suffering servant” of God such as: by causing her to move about on her knees at the rear of the cave; kissing the unclean earth in what was then a garbage dump for the village; digging in the mud with her hands; drinking muddy water; eating the bitter grass; smearing her face with mud so as to appear mad thereby evoking slaps and ridicule from onlookers; and finally through allowing Bernadette to suffer greatly in subsequent years from painful leg ulcers and yet to feel herself not meant for the relief that the spring would have afforded her at Massabielle.
None of this was fun, frivolous or light-hearted at all. It was, to the contrary, a deadly serious business with a very young girl chosen to be at its heart. How awful for us Catholics alive today that a young untutored girl responded to Our Lady’s message with far more adult dignity and respect than do our priests.
