PARISH LENTEN MISSION for A.D. 2022 CONFERENCE III: “LES MIRACULÉS”

(Given at the VIA CRUCIS, April 1st, 2022)

What we see at Lourdes today is the legacy of the National Pilgrimage of France which the Assumptionist Fathers began in 1873, on the heels of the first national Pilgrimage of Penance in 1872–150 years ago. The extravagant public religious devotions were part of the manifestation de foi which the Assumptionists made use of August after August. The prominent place of the sick in the Pilgrimage to Lourdes, tenderly cared for and fervently supported by the prayers of the Christian faithful around them, this was the signal work of the Assumptionists.
The Assumptionists believed that through the intercession of Notre-Dame de Lourdes, Mary the Immaculate Conception, a great spiritual renewal of France, of Rome, and indeed all of Christendom would come about. The working of miraculous signs of healing among the poorsick, carried to the baths at Lourdes in the same way that the people in the Gospels carried their sick to Christ, was to be the visible sign of the Divine Power channeling through Mary’s prayers.

In 1897, the 25th Jubilee of the National Pilgrimage, the Assumptionists sought to bring large numbers of the miraculés back to Lourdes for a procession of thanksgiving. Eighteen pilgrim trains set out from Paris and other regional cities to Lourdes that summer, totaling over 30,000 people, 1,000 of whom were the sick in the “white trains”. There was, however, in addition, a special train car painted in the papal colors of white and yellow. This car was reserved for the 325 miraculés.
At Lourdes, the Jubilee Year procession of the those who had received a miraculous healing at Lourdes moving between the lines of the sick and the dying in front of the Basilica, stirred up great emotion in the throngs of people gathered. Then Père François Picard, the Assumptionist who had been the leading organizer behind the National Pilgrimage for the last quarter-century, addressed the crowd in these words:
Well! My dear invalids, the procession is finished; we have fulfilled our duties, we have glorified Our Lord, the Blessed Virgin, the Pope; it is for you to do the rest. I have been asked to suggest invocations; I do not tell you to cry aloud. I ask you to listen to the voice that you hear within you, and faithfully to obey the supernatural impulses that you feel. Look at these, who have been cured; see the examples that you have before you; these are your models; believe as they do; like them you will be cured! Now, invalids, if you have faith, arise!
And then, what happened? Well...
At this remarkable command a few of the dying began to get off their stretchers and to walk away from the nurses. Spontaneously, the crowd began to sing the ‘Magnificat’, and the emotion reached unprecedented heights.  Before long there were more than forty ‘malades’ walking towards Picard, with the priests doing their best to organize a path so this procession of the newly risen could evade the groping hands of onlookers.
(From Ruth Harris, Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age, 1999, pp. 281-282)
Did the occurrence of miraculous healings of the sick at Lourdes, especially in manifestations like this one in 1897, convince the anti-religious and the anti-clerical, or at least soften their attitudes? It did not. In fact, it had the opposite effect. For such people, the “men of science”, the “men of learning” in the Third Republic, Lourdes was a trigger–it unhinged them! They were like loose doors banging in the wind! 
At Lourdes they saw only the Dark Ages of superstition, ignorance, and fanaticism. 
They did not believe in the reality of the miracles. In true male chauvinist fashion, they dismissed the preponderance of cures among women as female hysteria and womanly weakness. These dames, they weren’t really cured of anything, or if they were, it was only a condition which their weak, unstable womanly emotions had caused them in the first place.
Most notorious among the nay-sayers was the brilliant writer Emile Zola, whose 1893 novel Lourdes was a frontal attack on the Shrine. Zola also misrepresented the real-life individual women miraculés on whom he had based his principal characters. In real life, these women had received lasting cures. In Zola’s fictional world, however, they were drawn as pathetic pawns of Catholic clerical power, who had only gotten temporary relief from their hysterical conditions by the combination of Lourdes water and auto-suggestion.
The establishment of the Lourdes Medical Bureau in 1883 was an attempt to establish the “scientific” basis for the self-reported cures among the miraculés. It did not then, nor has it ever since, convinced those who are biased against any explanation of the miraculous. If anything, it has acted as a self-imposed handicap on what the Church herself can officially call “miraculous”. This is why the number of official “cures” recognized by the Lourdes Medical Bureau is so paltry compared to the vast number of people who have given thanks to God for having received a miraculous cure through Notre-Dame de Lourdes over these past 150 years.
One such miraculé was Fr. Timothy J. Danahy, (T.J. Danahy), who was the pastor of this parish from 1890 until his death in 1923 (this year will be the 99th Anniversary of his death). In the early 1890s he made a pilgrimage to Lourdes and he received a miraculous cure of his damaged eye-sight. He made a vow then and there at Lourdes that, in thanksgiving, he would one day build a church in honor of Our Lady of Lourdes. So this church of Mary Immaculate of Lourdes, in which we are praying tonight, is the votive offering of a Lourdes miraculé.
Father Higgins