The Miracle of Lourdes

by Ruth Cranston

Recounts the history of the French shrine, describes apparently miraculous cures, and discusses the attitudes of doctors and the Catholic Church toward the shrine.

Genres: Catholic

360 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1956

Reviews

[Steven H]

THE FAMOUS ACCOUNT OF A PROTESTANT VISITING THE FAMED SHRINE

Ruth Cranston (1887-1956) was an American author and lecturer on religion and other subjects. She published a number of novels under the pseudonym "Anne Warwick," then under her real name wrote nonfiction books such as 'World Faith,' 'The Unpretenders,' 'My Cosmopolitan Year,' etc. She was the daughter of a Methodist Bishop, and a Protestant.

She wrote in the Foreword to this 1955 book, "Two million persons visit the Shrine each year... They come with one common longing: to be healed of their miseries; there, at that simple altar in the rock, to be made whole. The cures are not, as is commonly supposed, of hysterical or neurotic patients. They are cures of diabetes, tuberculosis, blindness, tumors, bone disease, cancer. The day is past when professional men would scoff at such things... Investigations of the cures are as precise and methodical as the analyses at any first-class hospital. A Medical Commission of twenty distinguished physicians and surgeons of various countries passes upon these records before a cure is finally and officially declared. When it is declared, you may be sure it is authentic and rests on unimpeachable evidence."

She explains in the first chapter, "I began to want to see and study Lourdes for myself...Catholic leaders with whom I consulted seemed to think it might not be a bad idea to have a book on Lourdes written by a Protestant." (Pg. 4)

She adds, "Was this truly... a place of simple sincerity and wonderful deeds? Or was it a gigantic hoax... cleverly conceived by astute ecclesiastics to lead erring followers back into the fold? Was it a mass delusion... though as sincere, as that of which Bernadette herself was accused? Or was it an amazing and extraordinary fact... a challenge to medical men and to all men and women of this skeptical twentieth century?... I had no ax to grind. I belonged to no organization---religious, medical, or metaphysical. I was just an ordinary citizen with an inquiring mind and a friendly (if wary) spirit..." (Pg. 6)

She observes, "The question may be asked: Why this special, strong attraction to Lourdes above all healing centers? Why go six thousand miles, when many remarkable cures are claimed around the corner, so to speak, right here at home? How does Lourdes differ from other healing places?... The outstanding characteristic of the healing center at Lourdes, and the one that made it of particular interest to me, is the medical ...checking of alleged cures through an elaborate and rigorous scientific machinery involving large numbers of doctors, some of them religious, some not." (Pg. 6-7)

She points out, "the water at the Lourdes baths is not changed after each patient. Some say it is not changed all day. It has been described as 'dark and malodorous,' 'purplish,' 'inky,' 'a dreadful broth,' etc. Where two thousand patients are bathed in four hours, one follows swiftly upon another. Persons suffering from syphilis, cancer, tuberculosis, and all manner of diseases are immersed in the same bath water. The strange thing is that no infection ever results." (Pg. 36) She adds, "Chemically, however, the water of the Spring at Lourdes contains no curative or medicinal properties whatever." (Pg. 37)

She notes, "Dr. Blanton thinks that psychological factors have a great deal to do with the cures. This may seem true to some---at least in the matter of creating an atmosphere, opening the way." (Pg. 78) Later, she asks, "But why this apparent favoritism on the part of a compassionate Mother or Divine Creator? Why is George chosen and not Marcel? Why sinful coat heaver but not saintly nun who returns unrelieved of her hellish pain? This is the inscrutable mystery." (Pg. 138)

Of a skeptical doctor who was astonished to see a patient after her cure, she writes, "It was disconcerting, to say the least, to have declared after careful examination that a patient would die, and then watch her recover. He might have doubted his own diagnosis, or his own memory, if he had not kept a written record of the case...he was unable to offer any explanation for the incredible fact that she was alive and appeared to be cured... [He said] 'here is a cure I have seen with my own eyes... facts are not the whole answer. Such cures cannot be brought about my natural means. Autosuggestion is not the final answer---not the Lourdes water either, for cures have taken place without it." (Pg. 161-162)

She asserts, "One of the worst frauds against Lourdes was perpetrated by Zola who, by his own confession, in his novel 'Lourdes' deliberately altered the facts in accounts of three cures and made their story come out to suit himself---i.e., in death, not health as actually occurred." (Pg. 178)

Though seventy years old, this is a detailed, engagingly-written and informative account, that will be of great interest to anyone studying Lourdes.\

[William · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you judge the book on the merits the author describes in the closing chapter, it is a good book. The book does not attempt to be a summary of Lourdes, but only of the miracles that occur at Lourdes. It is a thorough book in that regard, complete with a multitude of interviews and firsthand experiences of the author. Plenty of previous works dealing with the subject have drawn in as well. The book also walks well the line of taking a stance while also not imposing it and leaving aspects up for interpretation. The references to the “postwar” world seem odd today but is a valuable contextual reminder of the era the book was written in.