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