Lourdes: A Den of Thieves

Everybody's faking it in Lourdes - everybody, that is, except for the thousands of sick pilgrims who converge on the famous town of some 18,000 inhabitants by the coachload.

They arrive desperately seeking a cure and depart clutching Virgin Mary-shaped plastic flasks filled with samples of the foul-tasting if putatively miraculous waters and with bags stuffed with other `made-in-Taiwan' relics. Amongst the hundreds of trinkets that the contemporary pilgrim can acquire in the crowded, tout-infested streets are glow-in-the-dark crucifixes, St. Bernadette ashtrays and drinks-mats, plastic snow-scenes and 3D viewers showing the miracle. There are even what look suspiciously like beer mugs and brandy balloons adorned with transfer-images of the ubiquitous saint.

What's more, it is not just commercialism aping piety; there is also religion passing itself off as modern consumerism. Take, for instance, the Pax Cinema offering as its current blockbuster "The Passion of Bernadette", not a film recently exhibited at Cannes (it has been off the circuits for quite a long time). One wonders if there is a free rosary given away with every bag of popcorn. It would, I think, demand a truly sincere faith or an equally profound lack of taste to find anything particularly moving in this place other than the pilgrims.

You approach the town with a sense of mounting expectation and the snow-capped Pyrenees that rise to greet you as you drive towards Lourdes enhance this feeling. It is only in hindsight that their majestic purity seems a mute reproach to the vulgar chicanery going on at their feet. However, as you drive into town passing the Rosary and Passion Hotels and forcing your way through narrow streets lined with bars and seemingly innumerable gift shops, this feeling of awe diminishes. Indeed, coming from Bangkok, one is almost reminded of Patpong, the only apparent difference being that here touts pimp for the Virgin and Bernadette. Reverence is rapidly replaced by macabre curiosity, and its difficult not to succumb to the temptation of playing `Spot the Terminal Case.'

The extent of the tide of human misery in Lourdes is almost overwhelming. Streets are crowded with processions of the aged, the crippled and the infirm all making their way down to the Grotto. You follow as what else is there to do? Even if one could afford the horrendous price of a drink in one of the cafés, it would be virtually impossible to get a seat, and it would take remarkable determination to fight one's way into the unspeakable shops. In any case, there remains a hard to acknowledge longing to find ones cynicism disproved, a vague hope of discovering some kind of spiritual reality behind the crass commercialism. Of course, one is to be disappointed.

On entering the grounds of the Grotto, tourists are warned against smoking, picnicking, littering and unseemly behavior, such as holding hands. The sign warning against the latter offence brings to mind depictions of Adam and Eve leaving Eden, the slash across the figures bearing a not too indistinct resemblance to the angel's sword. Passing the rather somber complex of 19th Century chapels, one is confronted by row upon row of candles, the price of lighting one being from 10 francs up. At the approach to the Grotte de Massabielle itself, there are more signs, this time requesting silence. A long queue of people stands behind a line of railings. There is a feeling of selfish intentness, with each pilgrim regarding the others as obstacles to his progress towards the cave. Shuffling along with the others, I found myself unconsciously reciting some lines from Eliot's Waste Land:

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

This fragmentary recollection was more than a little unfortunate as the lines are generally taken as an allusion to the Inferno.

During the walk through the town, it is sometimes hard not to regret the fact that Disney does not have the rights to the Bernadette legend; at least there would then not have been quite such a promiscuous proliferation of unauthorized images of her. However, on eventually reaching the Grotto, you feel that old Walt must have a hand in it all somewhere. How else can one explain the insipid, doe-eyed statue of the Virgin that stands in pride of place? Surely, this rather vulgar statue cannot be the product of genuine piety. Surely, whatever vision the fourteen-year-old miller's daughter may have seen back in 1858 could have borne no resemblance to this overgrown cake decoration. One thing, however, seems distinctly `un-Disneyish': the collection of a couple of dozen rusting crutches suspended on a line above the Grotto. Given their obvious age and the lack of more modern devices, like pacemakers, they can hardly inspire the pilgrims with much feeling of hope.

You stand beneath the statue at the Grotto, a little uncertain about what to do next, there being, I believe, no standard ritual laid down for such situations. Some pilgrims touch the moist wall and cross themselves; others stoop down and kiss it. Their faces express sentiments ranging from grim determination to piety. Few appear ecstatic, but then as far as I can see no one in the queue has been granted a miraculous cure. A non-believer but sensing that something is expected of me, I gingerly pat the wall and quickly make my way to the line of brass taps to taste the waters, feeling a little out of place. A sense of anticlimax descends. So, that's that then. After all the buildup, after all the pious stories of ones childhood, after all the expectations raised by a Roman Catholic education, to find a small, damp, empty cave at the heart of it all is a trifle disappointing.

Lourdes is a place saturated with signs. Billboards, directions, advertisements, warnings, interdictions and so on confront the visitor at every turn. Then, of course, there are the signs that so many of the pilgrims bring with them: the all too visible symptoms and ravages of their various terrible illnesses. Still, there is one sign that is conspicuously absent for most people: a unequivocal sign of some divine purpose; a sign that behind all the misery there is an omnipotent and beneficent will. This, perhaps, is the point of it all. Miracles not taking place everyday, Lourdes demands immense faith; without it, all you have is a garish statue and an empty grotto.

Copyright ©1995, 2010 Mark C. Squire