As the political situation for French Catholics deteriorated after 1879, with the proclamation of the Third Republic and the ascendancy of an explicitly anti-Catholic, anti-clerical political establishment, the Assumptionist Fathers audaciously ratcheted up the contest. They would make the Shrine at Lourdes a great stage where God’s divine power would show itself in miraculous healings, healings which all alikethe good and the bad, the believers and the unbelievers–could perceive with their own senses.

And what better candidates for miracles than the poor, sick people whom science had failed? The people for whom the much-vaunted medical science of the day could do nothing? This was the motivation behind the tremendous organizational effort to load up the “white trains” of desperately ill people and bring them to Lourdes.
In order to sufficiently appreciate what this involved we have to consider how immense were the practical difficulties that needed to be overcome. First, there was difficulty of physically bringing sick people to Lourdes itself, then getting them in and out of the baths, all the while caring for their basic needs. Many people were on stretchers. Other who could walk could not walk far and needed constant assistance. All of this heavy work fell upon the lay volunteers, the men’s Hospitallers and the well-to-do Ladies of Notre-Dame de Salut, and the women religious of the Petites-Soeurs de l’Assomption. To say this work was exhausting barely begins to convey what the helpers of the sick pilgrims had to do. Not to mention the fact that in these years the Lourdes Shrine was not at all prepared to take care of sick pilgrims. The sick were sometimes housed in the local people’s private homes, or in the Hospice of the Sisters of Charity of Nevers where Bernadette had once lived.
Another difficulty was the prevalence of infectious diseases among the sick. When we think of all of the protocols we have endured over these last two-plus years during the COVID-19 pandemic it is shocking to us to hear that you had masses of infectious people with all kinds of terrible diseases there in the Shrine, all in close quarters, and that you had the healthy care-givers of the sick moving among them, attending to their most personal needs, and clearly putting their own health and lives at risk to do so.
A third difficulty was the baths themselves. The guardians of the Shrine were concerned that the spring-fountain might run dry on them with all of the new demands being made for “Lourdes Water”. Therefore, the baths were filled with clean, fresh water only twice a day. A sick pilgrim had to make an act of faith upon an act of faith: first that they might receive a miraculous cure through Our Lady’s prayers, and second that they didn’t get something else left behind by all of the sick who had been placed in that dirty bath before them.
To many contemporaries, particularly the “men of science” who rejected all religion as superstition and psycho-pathology, this manifestation of the sick at the Lourdes National Pilgrimage was a scandal for its danger to public health alone. To the Assumptionists, however, the apparent fact that the baths at Lourdes were not vectors of contagion, despite all probability, added to their assurance that their work at Lourdes was especially pleasing to Heaven.
One thing which the integration and the elevation of the poor-sick at Lourdes demonstrably achieved in these early years was the realization and the revivifying of the ideal of the charitable works of Christianity as a way of serving Jesus Christ Himself under the guise of the unfortunate persons being helped. To serve and love the poor-sick at Lourdes was a means of serving and loving “Christ the Divine Leper”. He was the One they were really waiting upon.
Such a high-minded ideal born of faith and love was necessary in order to persevere in this exceedingly difficult, fatiguing and risky rôle of service at Lourdes. How else could you overcome your personal repugnance, especially if your normal conditions of life shielded you from these sights?
The people, women and men, who accompanied the sick to Lourdes on these pilgrimages did look to that higher view. And so, others seeing it were drawn to join them. This then was the real vector of contagion at Lourdes: it was the contagion of charity.
Fr. Higgins