OUR Lady of Lourdes, who appeared to the sickly girl Bernadette Soubirous in 1858 in Lourdes, France and who is honored today on her feast day, came into a society in which skepticism and revolutionary thinking were commonplace. In Saint Bernadette Soubirous, (1844-1879), Abbé François Trochu describes this atmosphere:
At St. John’s Club, conversation on the subject had just taken a livelier turn. Its members used to meet in a room of the Café Français near the church — and here were to be found the notables of the town, independent gentlemen, doctors, lawyers, magistrates, officials of all ranks.
The frequenters of St.John’s Club were not anti-clericals: not one of them would have passed the parish priest without greeting him or, on occasion, shaking hands with him. Moreover, no one in authority could have taken any exception to their convictions or their conduct. At this period, the Imperial government showed itself favourable to Catholics: The Revolution had not as yet had time to ‘recapture Napolean III’ on the morrow of his attempted assassination by Orsini on January 14th of this same year, 1858.
Nevertheless, in spite of its name and possibly without its members being fully conscious of the fact, there was at St. John’s Club a certain Voltarianism in the air. On the tables of the Café Français lay the two Paris dailies, La Presse and Le Siecle, which — to quote Montalembert — ‘have three times as many subscribers as all the other newspapers put together and contain almost daily attacks on religion and the clergy.’
Among the registered members of the club, the big Catholic daily, the Univers, counted but one solitary subscriber, Pailhasson, the chemist. The others no doubt considered that the ‘ultramontane’ journal of the fiery Louis Veuillot put the Pope too much above the Emperor, and so they fell back upon Le Siecle and La Presse. Periodically these two very secular papers would remind their readers that in those days of electric telegraphy and the steam-engine it was absurd simplicity, stupidity and obscurantism to admit the possibility of apparitions and miracles.
The previous evening, at the Lourdes club, in between two games of cards, the more free-thinking among the groups of friends found much amusement in the story of this young neurotic falling into trances every morning at the foot of the Massabielle rocks. But the genteel laughter of these gentlemen did not even shake the Cafe windows.
Pope Pius XII in his inspiring reflections on the apparitions of Lourdes on the occasion of the 100th anniversary in 1958 wrote:
To a society which in its public life often contests the supreme rights of God, to a society which would gain the whole world at the expense of its own soul and thus hasten to its own destruction, the Virgin Mother has sent a cry of alarm.
France was a society at the time of the apparitions moving inexorably toward the great apostasy we see today. The claims of a miracle were an embarrassment to the mentality of the time. Only scientists were capable of miracles, not God.
