Our People

Homily for Mass of Anointing on the Feast of Our Lady of Lourdes

By Most Rev. Anthony Fisher OP
Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney
11/2/2008

Last night I watched again The Song of Bernadette, a wartime film which reverently retold the story we celebrate in today’s Feast. It was made in the days when big cinema houses such as Twentieth Century Fox could still make films that were pro-religion and such films could receive fair treatment from the critics – in this case twelve Academy Award nominations and four actual Oscars, including Jennifer Jones best actress as St Bernadette. Yet even in those days the producers were worried it would whip up controversy amongst the religious and the anti-religious and so they put an imaginary line on the lips of Bernadette’s parish priest, Dean Peyramale (played by Charles Bickford) and the words were also put up on the screen as the film opened: “To those who believe in God, no explanation is necessary. To those who do not believe in God, no explanation is possible.”

After flashing up this message in the hope of appeasing all viewers, the film opens on this day, 11th February, 150 yrs ago, in 1858, when a fourteen-year-old peasant girl saw something in a cave in Massabielle near Lourdes. Bernadette Soubirous reported that she had seen a most beautiful lady, dressed in brilliant white and that she had invited Bernadette to pray the Rosary with her and to come back to the spot to talk with her.

At one of the return trips the Lady told her to “Go, drink and wash at the spring” and when Bernadette scratched at the spot the Lady indicated, there bubbled up a spring which flows to this day at a rate 120,000 litres a day and to which many have attributed miraculous powers of healing. On other occasions the Lady directed the building of a chapel at this place, the holding of processions there, and she announced herself as ‘the Immaculate Conception’.

Bernadette was the only one who saw the apparition or heard the voice, but within days ever-increasing crowds were gathering and extraordinary cures were occurring. The films details the devotion of the crowds, the horror of rationalist civic officials, the delight of the profiteers, the scepticism of the church authorities, the jealousy and confusion of many. Bernadette gradually wins over the sceptics, including the hardened ecclesiastics and nuns, and she dies heroically as a young, yet long-suffering nun, declaring to the end that she had seen the Lady.

To those who believe in God, no explanation is necessary. To those who do not believe in God, no explanation is possible. – so the film tells us. The second sentence is probably correct: none are so blind as those who will not see, as Jesus said; no end of evidence will convince one determined to resist. It is said the main thing holding up Mary MacKillop’s canonisation at the moment is that Australian doctors are reluctant ever to say the m-word. They are scientists and scientists don’t believe in miracles. Yet in the film, even the most stubbornly anti-religious figure, the Imperial Prosecutor Vital Dutour (played by Vincent Price), seems to weaken in the end.

But even if for the anti-religious no end of evidence will suffice, is it true to say that for people of faith none is required? Certainly not; we do not suspend our reason when we believe. As Pope John Paul II insisted in his great encyclical Fides et ratio, our faith must be reasonable and there are real dangers in a fideism that refuses rational scrutiny. It can lead to all sorts of superstition, fundamentalism, even terrorism.

Catholic faith does indeed seek explanation. That, in fact, is what theology is.

In real life the Imperial Prosecutor, Vital Dutour, was not an atheist but a pious Catholic. But he thought Bernardette was delusional and insisted on evidence before concluding there had been a miracle. Likewise, the Church. While the film regards poorly the Church’s insistence on a four-year-long investigation of the supposed apparitions and miracles, the fact is that without it the apparitions would never have been recognised, the feast would never have been instituted and the chapel would never have been built. And even if pilgrims would have come anyway, they too are charged by the Catholic faith not to be gullible. Even people of ‘simple faith’ must question those who claim to have miracle cures for arthritis, or to have seen UFOs, or to do anything else contrary to reason and experience. Of course, we must raise such questions open enough minds and hearts to having our reasoning and experience expanded by new facts. Of 5,000 cures reported in the first hundred years at Lourdes, only 58 were authenticated as miraculous after examination by the Lourdes Medical Bureau.

But that is surely enough: for the purpose of the miracles of Lourdes is not to abolish the medical profession or to grant some privilege to those who are cured. The purpose of the Lady of Lourdes was the effect all this has had and continues to have on the millions it inspires: the millions of devotees and pilgrims, who come each year and expand their spiritual horizons and opening themselves to God’s healing grace and Our Lady’s intercession. The millions of prayers by the sick and for the sick, so much so that the Feast of Our Lady of Lourdes became the World Day of Prayer for the Sick. This is the miracle of Lourdes and this apparition continues to this day.

And so today we come to anoint the sick of our parish and to pray for all the sick of our families, friends and world, confident that, especially on this 150th anniversary, Our Lady and the saints will be praying with us and for us and that Christ, the physician of our bodies and souls, will lend us his healing touch.