Kaufman, Suzanne.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. viii + 255 pp., $34.95
(cloth). ISBN: 0-8014-4248-6.
[1] One of the most dramatic images of Jesus as Christus
medicus can be found in Luke’s gospel. While
teaching a large crowd, “the power of the Lord was with
him for healing” and “some men brought on a stretcher
a man who was paralyzed; they were trying to bring him in and
set him in his presence. But not finding a way to bring
him in because of the crowd, they went up on the roof and lowered
him on the stretcher through the tiles into the middle in front
of Jesus. When he saw their faith, he said, ‘As for
you, your sins are forgiven’” (Luke 5:17-20). Grumbling
over this favour arose among the scribes and Pharisees and Jesus
turned to them and said, “Which is easier, to say, ‘Your
sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Rise and walk’? But
that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth
to forgive sins’—he said to the man who was paralyzed, ‘I
say to you, rise, pick up your stretcher and go home.’ He
stood up immediately before them, picked up what he had been
lying on, and went home, glorifying God. The astonishment
seized them all and they glorified God, and, struck with awe,
they said, ‘We have seen incredible things today’” (Luke
5:23-26).
[2] Belief and unbelief. The pericope is wonderfully
understated, but drives home the point to Jesus’ immediate
audience, as well as the contemporary reader or hearer. There
will be some who believe and some who will scoff, and the division
registers in stark terms. The spectacle is what is believable
and belief leads to trust in the marvelous. We are told that
the one lowered through the rooftop is a paralytic, but it would
not be too much to conjecture that he is also a mute. His
lack of dialogue, even with the one who heals him, is striking. The
narrator controls his speech.
[3] This is a long preamble to what lies at the heart of Suzanne
Kaufman’s study on the making and continued sensation of the
Lourdes shrine. With the aid of dozens of illustrations, she
has developed a case for the commodification of this pilgrimage
site and shown how its success depended upon four things: a
deeply embedded French Catholic piety (especially among women);
the prospect of commercial development; “proofs” of
cures that confounded the medical establishment; and a campaign
in which clergy, hierarchy, the Lourdes medical bureau, and local
civil officials conspired to make the fabulous available for public
consumption. It is a history of popular approaches to the
sacred, a history that is often in tension with the objectivity
of medical science, perhaps typified by Jean-Martin Charcot’s
studies on hysteria then underway at the Salpêtrière,
or naysayers such as Émile Zola who wrote about the throngs
of pilgrims as succumbing to a crass and foolish impulse. The
wider secularization program of the Third Republic also challenged
the devotionalism of many in French society, including that of the
privileged class. It was a fine line between the tourism being
promoted at Massabielle, where restful scenery and rejuvenating
waters awaited those who could afford the trip, and the religious
sentiments the grotto was meant to awaken.
[4] Kaufman’s work builds on recent histories of the
French peasant, Bernadette Soubirous who, literally and figuratively,
found the wellspring that helped make Lourdes what it is; as well
as histories of the shrine itself. (See, for example, Thérèse
Taylor’s two works: Bernadette of Lourdes: Her Life,
Death, and Visions [Burns and Oates, 2003], and “‘So
Many Extraordinary Things to Tell’: Letters from Lourdes,
1858,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 46 (1995):
457-481; and Ruth Harris’s Lourdes: Body and Spirit
in the Secular Age [Penguin Compass, 1999].) Her methodology
attends to cultural theory of late nineteenth century France, especially
in the intersection of consumer appetites, advertising, and spiritual
discourse. “The notion that real spirituality resides
beyond the dross of the marketplace needs to be challenged,” writes
Kaufman (7). In this she allies herself with Colleen McDannell’s Material
Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America (Yale
University Press, 1995). Kaufman is also eager to offer critique
of the industry that arose around the shrine, but she does so at
some remove from the leanings of the Frankfurt School (especially
Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Walter Benjamin), who viewed
capitalism and ease of reproduction of goods as elements that conspire
to export “mass deception” (7). For her part,
Kaufman repositions the role of the shrine as generating “innovative
and exhilarating manifestations of popular religious faith while
also arousing singularly modern anxieties over the appropriate relationship
between belief and the market” (9).
[5] The first three decades of the shrine’s development
(roughly from 1858-1888) belonged largely to the Church. Bishop
Bertrand-Sévère Laurence, the prelate of Tarbes and
Lourdes, validated the cult and placed the shrine in the care of
the Garaison fathers, also known as the Grotto fathers. These
men constructed the church and began to print images of young Bernadette,
piously posed and dressed in Pyrenean garb, in order to elicit greater
response by the faithful, even while domesticating early grassroots
devotions. The Assumptionist fathers proved to be able partners
in the building program, in part because they were masters of promotion,
lending an air of authenticity to the religious articles then being
sold (neither they, nor the Grotto fathers made direct profits)
as well as securing the railroad traffic necessary for bringing
pilgrims en masse. The Assumptionists also used the
mass media in suggesting to tourists from the cities that their
money could go far in Lourdes. Value and spiritual benefits
proved to be a winning combination. Hotels were built and
gladly cashed in, no matter the season. By 1888, the religious
pilgrim rubbed shoulders with the casual observer in what had become
a national centre for Catholic devotion. The only real rival
in France was the La Sallette shrine, to which Kaufman makes passing
reference, though the study might have been enhanced by further
comparison.
[6] If the commercialism of Lourdes prompted critics to launch
attacks, the site’s miraculous cures also brought out scoffers. Kaufman
describes the reaction of believers as one that embraced “scientific
sensationalism,” that is, the malades who walked away
cured had their cases ratified privately by medical science and
publicly by popular acclamation. Often the miraculées were
displayed before large crowds as part of the refutation of charges
of simple hysteria or those who responded blithely to the power
of suggestion, the so-called hallucinée. The
care that Kaufman takes in conveying the nature of these debates
is one of the strengths of the book, for it is mainly through the
spectacle of the cured that the shrine continued to draw pilgrims. The
cures were also marketed on postcards and in other promotional literature. “Before
and after” photographs sold the would-be pilgrim on the efficacy
of the shrine and enticed them to bring their own ailments before
the Virgin at the Grotto. Kaufman builds on this in a later
chapter focusing primarily on female pilgrims who were cured. Their
cases are not only spectacular but they also trigger a pathos that
is part of French Catholic piety going back to Jean d’Arc—these miraculées were “martyr-like
heroines who became objects of grace” (137). Kaufman
takes the reader through a sampling of 117 female miracle narratives
that she examined in the archives of the Lourdes shrine.
[7] The narratives of these and others who claimed cures are
among the best aspects of Kaufman’s research. Those
who would subvert the authenticity and sincerity of the cured often
attempted to make fools of the doctors at the Medical Bureau by
planting hysterics who would respond to any suggestion of a miracle. News
of these fakes spread through France and often the repercussions
were settled in court in favour of the doctors, who were seen as
representing religion. The Virgin was seen to triumph time
after time; those who would profane the shrine were rewarded by
embarrassment or fines. If the impious bemoaned their fate,
they did not go away. The controversies they stirred were
taken up elsewhere in Europe, but also in the United States. Unfortunately
Kaufman does not venture to explore the implications surrounding
the veracity of the cures as they play themselves out in the abundant
religious literature in America. Whether in the pages of Ave
Maria magazine or the more scholarly denizens of the Catholic
World, there is ample evidence that Lourdes fascinated American
Catholics and Protestants alike. Yet this should not detract from
this important study on late nineteenth century French Catholicism
and the rise of one of the world’s most visited pilgrimage
destinations.
Patrick J. Hayes
St. John’s University
hayesp@stjohns.edu
