Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age (Compass) [Paperback]

Ruth Harris (Author)

Book Description

Series: Compass | Publication Date: December 5, 2000

In 1858 near the tiny French town of Lourdes, a young peasant girl named Bernadette Soubirous witnessed the Virgin Mary in a grotto. Since then Lourdes has become the most visited shrine in the world, hosting nearly five million pilgrims each year. Historian Ruth Harris traces this shrine's incredible development, placing Lourdes at the center of nineteenth-century debates on religion, science, and medicine that still continue today. She examines the pivotal role of women and children as visionaries, devotees, and advocates, addressing issues of mysticism and nonorthodox faith that speak to our own era of spirituality. Above all, she explores how, at a moment in French history when the Catholic Church was under attack, this place of pilgrimage improbably prospered.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Lourdes by Ruth Harris is a compulsively readable history of the most famous Catholic healing shrine in the world. In 1858, a peasant girl named Bernadette saw the Virgin Mary in a grotto. Millions of pilgrims from around the world have since traveled to Lourdes in order to petition the Virgin for healing. In Harris's hands, the story of Lourdes (up to World War I) is "a story about France, about the struggles of Catholics in the aftermath of revolutionary turmoil, the capacity of the Second Empire to adjust to, and even profit from, religious movements, and the inability of the Third Republic to suppress them." It is also "a focal point in the wider debate between science and religion, and between anti-clericalism and clericalism." If you don't have the historical knowledge to recognize or consider all of the topics identified above, don't worry about it. Harris will give it to you, in language that is as down to earth as it is sophisticated. Her arguments (illustrated by dozens of fascinating photographs) range widely, but through them all she remains attentive to "one fixed point: the essential image of a young, poverty-stricken and sickly girl kneeling in ecstasy in a muddy grotto." --Michael Joseph Gross --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

This is a deftly balanced history of religious pilgrimage to the small town of Lourdes in the foothills of the French Pyrenees. Harris crafts a book that simultaneously provides a historical context of the pilgrimage for religious readers and constructs an interpretive model for nonbelievers that will enable them to sympathize with the appeal of the tradition rather than dismiss it as ignorant superstition. Lourdes became the focal point for pilgrimage by Catholic followers of the Virgin Mary after a 14-year-old girl named Bernadette Soubirous began having visions of a figure (who identified herself as the Immaculate Conception) in a grotto in 1858. Harris, a historian at Oxford University (Murders and Madness: Medicine, Law, and Society in the Fin de Si?cle), accomplishes her goal of respecting the religious tradition of the site while offering a dense social history of what appears to be a cultural paradoxAthe growing popularity of the shrine during periods of rapid secularizationAby contextualizing the pilgrimage within the broader histories of the French nation, the Catholic church and the worldwide Marianist movement. One of the more interesting features she analyzes is the constant interplay between strong religious women and male authority figures throughout the history of the increasing popularity of the shrine. Harris also explores the interdependent relationship between positivistic science and the spirituality represented by the grotto, and she challenges the notion that the two remain in clear and perpetual opposition. A deceptively easy read, this is in fact a complex and sensitive history that refuses to dehumanize religious believers. Photos not seen by PW. (Nov.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 496 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics); 2nd edition (December 5, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140196188
• ISBN-13: 978-0140196184
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.1 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #971,429 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very Informative, January 26, 2000

By 

Judith Noone (Rome, New York USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age (Hardcover)

Everything you ever wanted to know about Bernadette Soubirous, Lourdes, Catholicism and French politics. It is definitely not a "Song of Bernadette" type of book, but,scholarly and, for the most part, a real page turner. It's obvious that a great deal of effort went into it. The bibliography, alone, is mind-boggling! It is not time wasted to read this book.

47 of 57 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Flawed but interesting, August 23, 2000

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This review is from: Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age (Hardcover)

This is a well-researched, well-written study of Lourdes, its origin and its impact. It's excellent history, on the whole. But the interpretation of Lourdes leaves much to be desired. Harris does not believe in the miracles she describes--she is Jewish--and fails, ultimately, to take a position on Lourdes that is anything other than vague and unsatisfactory. Moreover, the narrative is marred by feminism (a couple of lines on page 331 evoked laughter) and an undue emphasis on the anti-Semitism inherent in 19th century France. Harris is every bit the politically correct historian of her time. Alas.

Oh yes, we also get a nice dose of anti-Catholicism in the Epilogue. It seems that the Church liked Nazis. Alas. And the critics rave.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A miracle that survives a historian's scrutiny, September 8, 2004

By 

Jean E. Pouliot (Newburyport, MA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age (Compass) (Paperback)

Unlike the standard pious or devotional book on the phenomenon of Lourdes, Ruth Harris approaches her subject not as a devotee or skeptic, but as a historian. With no axe to grind, she (theoretically) can take a dispassionate view of a topic that has claimed the passions of generations of believers and non-believers since 1858, when Bernadette Soubirous reported her visions of the Blessed Virgin. Harris chronicles the visions themselves, of course, but throws her net much wider to help the reader understand their historical and social context.

In 1854, Pope Pius IX (whose anti-democratic bent would appall modern American Catholics) promulgated the dogma of the Immaculate Conception - which stated that the Blessed Virgin herself was conceived without the stain of Original Sin. Just four years later, Bernadette's vision revealed its identity in Bernadette's Pyrenean patois: "Y soy Immaculad Conceptua" -- virtually confirming the newly-proclaimed dogma. How this must have gratified the wing of the Church that supported the Pope - and how it must have rankled those who saw Pius IX as a retrograde disaster for the Church!

Harris subjects Bernadette herself to close scrutiny, chronicling her family's hardscrabble existence, her father's business incompetence and the family's recent shameful residence in a cold, drafty former prison. Harris presents the Bernadette of history--asthmatic, lice-ridden, desperately poor, barely educated yet devoutly religious--whom the Virgin graced with her visible presence. In detailing Bernadette's stark, grimy reality, Harris allows us to witness the girl's no-nonsense and even gritty brand of holiness.

Bernadette's visions are wonderfully detailed. Many will be surprised that Bernadette's vision of a playful 9-year-old differs markedly from the standard image of the Blessed Mother. Harris portrays Bernadette's poignant and fruitless attempts to prevent her countrymen from correcting the apparitions to make them conform to their impression of what the Virgin "really" looked like. It is such delightful glimpses into Bernadette's world that make the book so fascinating.

Harris goes well beyond the Lourdes apparitions. She explains why, of all the Lourdes visionaries, only Bernadette's visions are passed along to us. She discusses how Bernadette's post-vision behavior was vital to "selling" the apparitions to the public. Harris discusses the economics and small-time politics of the region, its native patois and the confusing political/religious alliances that sought to use Lourdes to further their own causes. Along the way, Harris spotlights the emerging role of science in the 19th century, and the antipathy with which luminaries of the day (notably Emile Zola) viewed the cures and miracles of Lourdes.

The Lourdes phenomenon teaches that holiness cannot be understood apart from the hopes and social circumstances of real life. The apparitions, bound so tightly to the language, dress and prejudices of a particular people, place and time, seem truer than if they were otherworldly and distant. The Virgin Mary, dressed in the garb of Bernadette's time, speaking her patois, connecting with her girlish heart through play, spoke to a single girl in space and time. But by doing so, she speaks with greater clarity to all people in all times.

That the phenomenon of Lourdes can survive the scrutiny of a historian's eye is almost as miraculous as the original luminous apparition!