Lourdes
Paulding, Gouverneur
COMMONWEAL THE 16 November 6, I929 LOURDES By GOUVERNEUR PAULDING W HAT is Lourdes? What does it force Much has been written about Lourdes, but the following paper is different. It...
...Here cancer, paralysis, galloping consumption push you aside to get past...
...and in one sense they do, but it is urgent to realize in what sense...
...Modern thought and conditions hide suffering as if in a cupboard, it must be diminished by scientific treatment of its causes...
...Not even mainly for the sick...
...The prayer is enormously amplified...
...Lourdes is no spick and span hospital with visiting hours and bulletins for the anxious relatives at the gate...
...Logically this attitude leads to birth control, It is necessary to make clear at the start the sense of this article...
...There are ten thousand pilgrims...
...He expects ten thousand people to call for ten thousand miracles...
...and wrote a treatise on hunting...
...The writer came to Lourdes intensely sterilization of the unfit, the classic overdose for the conscious of the physical suffering present there...
...Lourdes is a more vivid and to us a more easily readable explanation than the portal of a Romanesqpe church or the storied windows of Chartres...
...This dying~measures still to varying degrees unacceptable was something apart from himself---exterior, i t was to that remnant of Catholic heredity which is public rather as if Lourdes existed for the sick alone...
...They adstill left him apart, since a miracle, he felt, in no way vance toward the basilica inseparably confused in the narrow streets...
...Six of them, and only six, are prayers for a bodily cure...
...The answer to the question is the explanation of Lourdes...
...Is this effort expressed in hysterical repetition for humanity, sick or well...
...After Lourdes, the traveler often visits Pau...
...Disease is no longer a civic shame, controlled, labeled, segregated and hidden in public-spirited antisepsis...
...It is that the prayer is acle...
...He did sentiment...
...which are of vital importance--and which will be dis- There are only six direct appeals for the saving of cussed in a momentmand the Blessed Sacrament is the body...
...He represents with Ten thousand people expect a possible relief to a misery that is there before them within sight and touch...
...derstand...
...It is divine and human pity that bring the carried in procession in benediction of the sick...
...The sick actually and in reality to a young shepherdess named and the well are inseparable--one body with the same Bernadette...
...An open truck goes down the street pushing people der what they, well and sick, have in common...
...What is this form...
...it is a Passion play" lated in some China or India out of sight---or in "instibut the actors literally suffer their passion, and hope for and sometimes witness a miracle...
...The do, in what manner, and for what, they pray...
...GILBERT BLAKE...
...Yet the authorized form of prayers at Lourdes includes only a small proportion for bodily cure and these, too, apply equally to cure of the soul...
...not divided into the sick and well...
...Where it continues to exist it Catholic Church...
...It is possible to live ten years in a modern not feel superior to them" he felt very far beneath city and know no more of suffering than a street accitheir greater reality--but he felt unconcerned...
...The implications are set forth with an insight which remains vastly more than interestiny.--The Editors...
...The first element eler and the materialist's rhetorical question is best found in precise and accurate observation of what takes place during the ceremony at the grotto and in the Catholic attitude toward suffering is that it shall 17 COMMONWEAL THE November 6, 1929 before the basilica...
...The majority of them are acts of belief, love and confidence in God...
...Living in these finger-tips...
...What takes place at the grotto and before the basilica has been qualified so often as collective hysteria that he expects an attitude, not of course in conflict with the teaching of the Church, but perhaps a little exceptional, as he would put it...
...The knowledge which from the first he cannot avoid is that Lourdes represents the Catholic attitude toward suffering, and is "the illustration of a truth taught by the This is the first step on the way toward understanding...
...That is to say, what the pilgrims All other considerations are beside the point...
...The traveler will reflect that Lourdes exists fied from the prayer of each individual and that prayer can be known...
...The weight given to a prayer lived in the fourteenth century, encouraged the arts repeated aloud by ten thousand people is immense...
...In the lovely gardens that surround the renaissance castle It is this collective prayer that has been considered of Henry IV they will see, and notice, f o r it is charmsome degree of melancholy the beautiful carelessness of health, intelligence and poetry...
...must be alleviated, cured if possible, in any case isoLourdes is a miracle play...
...Apart from this form and hymns, the only other prayer employed at Lourdes is the universal rite of the Catholic Church...
...Behind them do ask for ten thousand miracles of divine pity...
...Eucharist Christ within me, every part...
...All day long they have to forge their way through an enormous crowd...
...The object-lesson of Lourdes put him back into his place in the Catholic order...
...Laid across it side by side are stretchers...
...There are massed the pilgrims...
...But the fact, to which enough importance cannot be given, is that they are a set form and that form the only one authorized for use at Lourdes...
...For it is a shocking, almost immoral thing to see, and a reproach to the perfection ot: our civilization...
...tutions...
...Materialists have asked why, if the Catholic attitude admits suffering as an intimate and never absent companion, should it lay such tremendous public emphasis on an occasional miracle that annihilates it...
...It is the privation of God obvious that the only element open to discussion and that Lourdes prays to be spared...
...All day long the streets are filled with stretchers...
...They will not be separated when they pray before the grotto...
...The well do not What the pilgrims do is quickly told...
...were of little value, and he would hope for a miracle In Lourdes today there are a thousand incurable since assuredly miracles occurred at Lourdes...
...The suffering body to Lourdes...
...The supplications are not for the where, on February II, I858, Our Lady appeared sick alone...
...One body with the same prayer...
...All six are taken directly from the New Testament...
...This article narrates how he followed the sick toward a sounder comprehension...
...And that the worse of the two is the void of the soul that does not know itself...
...What does it force Much has been written about Lourdes, but the following paper is different...
...If these supplications were improvised under the stress of emotions, they might well indeed lead to anything...
...to show the careless world of which this young man in Pau is the personification that material and spiritual Before and during the procession of the Blessed suffering exists...
...Visibly in Lourdes they are attached to the same Catholic body...
...In Lourdes would give them his prayers but he felt his prayers suffering is visible, unashamed...
...And this while he still is in the streets crowded with shops of tawdry, though religious souvenirs...
...The supplications are in seven sections...
...The traveler begins to woncould be related to his desire for it...
...It is concerned with that misery...
...They are then drawn up in a double and triple line of stretchers on two sides of the the health of the body...
...This statue is criminate reading, feels may be exceptional in its of a young man dressed in the classical fashion, a huntinsistence on bodily relief and positive, immediate, ing dog at his feet: his name was Gaston Phoebus: he miraculous intervention...
...It is that the pilgrims are of prayers to that effect...
...There are public prayers times that this, perhaps the most innocent and temare ten thousand desperate needs...
...But it is ampli- Lourdes...
...Pain is, to many minds, the antithesis of civilization...
...What is he made to see before anything else ---before any prayer---before any attempt to realize the stupendous reality of the fact that Our Lady the Mother of God appeared to Bernadette in the grotto...
...In my eyes, my skin, my bones, Christ's white Body now atones For the sins that broached the flesh, And within me, making fresh, Stilling the tumultuous flood, Are the drops of His own Blood...
...That prayer sary to each individual---for the soul of the sinner, for grims believe it: our concern is with them...
...Christ within me I Christ remain I Lest again the Lamb be slain...
...The sick and come to pray for the sick...
...The answer to the uncertainty of the Catholic travup against the fronts of the shops of religious souvenirs...
...But the deadlier waters presumed to have miraculous curative virtue, and eternal misery of the soul is its great preoccupation and the blessing of all the pilgrims by Him whom always, and the prayers at Lourdes are first of all Catholics consider the Master of all existence...
...In the words of which always has greatly been discussed, is the human Leon Bloy "the only misery is that we are not saints...
...COMMONWEAL THE 16 November 6, I929 LOURDES By GOUVERNEUR PAULDING W HAT is Lourdes...
...ber forty-six...
...It embodies the response to one genthe traveler to un- uinely identified with the "'younger generation" to an ideal and an appeal which this generation too frequently ignores...
...When he finds out, Lourdes will have taught him his lesson...
...Sixteen of them are addressed to the Mother of God and implore her prayers...
...All six, spoken by the able-bodied pilgrim, apply to the cure of the soul...
...The sick praises God, believes in God, loves God and asks, if are dipped in the waters of a spring revealed to Berna- it be His will, for relief...
...Lourdes mainly a concentrated effort to obtain a mir- What they show is luminous...
...He dent and an ambulance hurrying by...
...They num...
...In this mouth, and on these lips...
...Health is our right hand and disease is our left...
...element : how does the pilgrim pray and for what precisely does he pray...
...He came then into Lourdes a Catholic and with the understanding of a man who might never even have heard of Catholicism...
...It is too hot to have many blankets...
...You see a body without legs'you see legs swollen the size of the body" you see the strange immobility of the heads---eyes staring wide---eyes closed--in an all-important and absorbing intimacy with pain...
...Sacrament the pilgrims repeat after their priests a series of supplications...
...And the Church asks six procession refinters the church, the rites concluded...
...not be hidden...
...At the corner the truck breaks through a long procession of wheeled stretchers brought down from the hospitals by volunteer stretcher-bearers...
...Paulding, "'suffering is visible, unashamed...
...For whatever relief is necesdette by Our Lady...
...But that cases...
...In that sense the ten thousand great esplanade in front of the basilica...
...Is essential matter of Lourdes lies in these few lines...
...Impertinent...
...His back is turned on hysterical, and it is this prayer that the Catholic com- ing, the first statue to meet their eyes after that of ing to Lourdes, his mind filled with memories of indis- Our Lady at the Grotto in Lourdes...
...They come to pray because the well--but who is well?--pray before the grotto of their own misery...
...Would not the demand for a miracle be somewhat unreasonable...
...In my mind and in my heart...
...This ceremony then consists in prayer, immersion in porary form of suffering, be averted...
...Christ within me, healing whole, Mind and this unquiet soul...
...But in Lourdes,'" says Mr...
...The fact is not to be discussed: the pil- needs...
Vol. 11 • November 1929 • No. 1
