On Faithful Science and Scientific Faith

Following the Apparition of Our Lady of Lourdes

Modern Church History

Dr. Ann T. Orlando

Br. Paul M. Nguyen, OMV

Congregationis Oblatorum Beat Mari Virginis
May 8, 2015

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At the height of a contentious age, following the dogmatic definition of the Immaculate
Conception of Mary, she appeared to a poor girl in foothills of the upper Pyrenees. And like the
miraculous spring at the Grotto of Massabielle, there gushed forth widespread devotion to Our
Lady at her shrine. In Lourdes, the civil authorities quickly closed the apparition site, and
ecclesiastical authorities monitored the developments in the community and in Bernadette, the
shepherdess visionary herself. Soon, however, it became clear that the apparitions to Bernadette
were not hallucinations or imagined exchanges, and not only lacked heterodoxy, but expounded
an orthodoxy she never could have known. As the apparition site was reopened and devotees and
the curious alike began to come, the miraculous healings and conversions began. The
ecclesiastical authority had served to authenticate the original events; now medical experts began
to play an increasingly prominent role in authenticating the alleged supernatural experiences of
pilgrims to the shrine. The doctor Baron Georges-Fernand Dunot de Saint-Maclou (1828-1891),
the founder (1883) and first director (1884-91) of the Bureau des Constatations Mdicales,1 had
a major guiding influence on what became a major debate between faith and science. As he
examined purported healings, he exercised a wise balance between a belief in the possibility of
miracles with a firm faith of his own and a realistic diligence in letting the medical sciences take
their course. The battle between faith and science at Lourdes is the subject of our present
investigation.
The scientific community had always been suspicious of the mountain people of the
Pyrenees, with their own patois language and their forest and mountain lore of fairies and spirits
alongside numerous devotional chapels throughout the region, some with their own statues and
springs.2 According to the times, Lourdes could have been just another one of these cute sites,

1
2

Andrea Brustolon, Georges-Fernand Dunot de Saint-Maclou (Gorle, Italy: VELAR, 2014), 343-344, 363, 386.
Ruth Harris, Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age (New York: Viking, 1999), 24-37.

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just another girl with a wild imagination, especially since her Aquro neither spoke nor appeared
to others. It comes as no surprise, then, that, just as Bernadette was subjected to physical testing
designed to break through any trance or psychosomatic delusions,3 so also pilgrims who claimed
a supernatural cure would be subjected to rigorous examinations.
In the decades following the apparitions, besides the miracles of the pin and candle that
Bernadette herself experienced, many miraculous healings and conversions took place at the
shrine either in moments of intense devotion at Mass or in the processions, or in the baths of the
miraculous spring. In the early days, the local bishop, Monseigneur Laurence, established an
Episcopal Commission to investigate such cures; led by the Canon Germain Baradre, this
commission only consulted physicians when necessary.4 They initially considered not only the
basic medical evidence for the remedy of a certain ailment, but also the social dimension,
including whether the allegedly cured had told anyone else about the prior condition, the desire
to seek healing at Lourdes, or the healing itself. All of this reported testimony would add to the
case for establishing that a miraculous cure had been obtained there.5 There was a prior work for
these doctors and clerics alike to consult: Benedict XIVs De servorum Dei beatificatione et
beatorum canonizatione of 1734-38. This work identified seven conditions for verifying a cure:
the gravity and difficulty of treating the illness, ... proof that either no medication had been used
or that it had been entirely inefficacious, [it] had to be instantaneous, non-recurring, perfect in
its completion, and not improved by some earlier determinate cause.6 Also, it was easier in
those days to prove that healings were miraculous if medicine had failed, rather than if no
medical intervention was attempted prior; Baradres commission, however, often suspended one

3
4
5
6

Harris, Lourdes, 61-63.

Ibid., 293.
Ibid., 294.
Ibid., 322.

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or another of these conditions when the cure seemed obvious enough.7 It is notable that the
cultural milieu of the region often included recourse to supernatural or at least superstitious
methods, professional medicine being largely unaccessible both because of geography and
poverty. Harris also recounts the story of a boy, Henri Busquet, whose neck and chest tumor was
verified by a local clergyman, and in a moment of devotion, the boy both drank and applied
Lourdes water to his dressing (against the counsel of the priest) and was cured.8 The intense
devotional aspect of healings is shown in another story that Harris recounts, concerning a young
woman, Marie Louise Moreau, whose family was moved to pray a novena, together with a vow
to visit Lourdes in thanksgiving if their daughter was cured.9 At the conclusion of the novena,
she placed a cloth soaked in Lourdes water around her head and her eyesight was restored. The
clerical Commission clearly recognized both the physical transformation and the devotion of
both the girl who was cured and her family; they made their thanksgiving pilgrimage the next
year with great piety.10
Harris argues that after those 1862 judgments of the Episcopal Commission, there was a
period in which all the devotions (and miracles) continued without a dedicated effort of
examination. From December 1876, the healings came under examination once again, this time
with more elaborate medical processes, in order to answer popular skepticism from without.11 A
doctor, Henri Vergez (1814-1888), together with the Garaison Fathers at the shrine, who became
Missionaries of the Immaculate Conception that year, developed a process of reporting on each
ill person, on his medical, spiritual, and social condition.12 This doctor was greatly respected for
his diligence and honesty among the doctors of Montpellier, and brought this stature to the
7
8
9
10
11
12

Ibid., 322.
Ibid., 297-98.
cf. Brustolon, Dunot de Saint-Maclou, 506-507.
Harris, Lourdes, 299-300.
Ibid., 300-301; and Brustolon, Dunot de Saint-Maclou, 258.
Harris, Lourdes, 301-302; and Brustolon, Dunot de Saint-Maclou, 256-58, 333-34.

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shrine; his methodology was scrupulous, careful not to declare any healings as miraculous that
were doubtful or uncertain.13 At the same time, he often aired on the side of natural
explanations, whereas the priest Baradre more easily saw the intervention of grace in alleged
cures, even if they seemed to be naturally psychosomatic.14
Following upon Pope Leo XIIIs promotion of Thomism and his insistence on truth in the
face of modern currents of relativism and subjectivism, the founding doctor of the Bureau des
Constatations Mdicales entered the scene.15 Georges-Fernand Dunot de Saint-Maclou arrived at
Lourdes first in 1877, and then returned on the occasion of the National Pilgrimage of 1879, and
again in 1883 to assume the role of assisting the Hospitaliers and also examining cases of
healings, which were heard, up to that time, in the parlor of the chaplains.16 Dunot made his first
pilgrimage to Lourdes at the behest of his wife, who died there in 1877. He retired to Nice and
requested to enter the Oblates of the Virgin Mary there; he was later received as a secular
associate of the congregation.17 Consistent with this formal devotion to the Church, Dunot
himself was fascinated by Thomistic philosophy, and by his dedication to study and his fidelity
to Thomistic principles, he personified the faithful Catholic who acknowledged the value of the
sciences in the pursuit and contemplation of the truth.18 Dunots method showed that he was
acutely aware of the challenge from the Parisian psychologists regarding the dynamics of
hysteria and hypnotic and suggestion-based therapies (largely the work of Jean-Martin Charcot
[1825-1893] and his Ecole Salptrire). Dunot knew that he needed to document beyond
reproach what was actually happening at Lourdes and in the lives of the Virgins devotees, so he
invited numerous medical experts that soon supplanted the prior dominance of clergy in this
13
14
15
16
17
18

Brustolon, Dunot de Saint-Maclou, 333-4.

Harris, Lourdes, 324-25.
Brustolon, Dunot de Saint-Maclou, 340-341.
Ibid., 341.
Brustolon, Dunot de Saint-Maclou, 250-262.
Harris, Lourdes, 326; Brustolon, Dunot de Saint-Maclou, 344.

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process.19
In fact, a vicious anti-clericalism developed at the close of the 19th century in the debate
between Gustave Boissaries (1836-1917) leadership of the Bureau (starting in 1891, following
Dunot) and mile Zolas (1840-1902) Lourdes, published in 1894.20 Harris presents Boissarie as
hated from both sides: For the anti-clerical opposition he was credulous, but for believing
Catholics his skepticism was notorious.21 During his term, the examinations at Lourdes finally
moved into the permanent building that Dunot had envisioned, and the surge of medical experts
there was finally achieved. Despite Boissaries apparent skepticism in the eyes of the devout, he
did believe in miracles, and sought scientific confirmation of the power of the supernatural
through various publications and conferences. Zolas agenda, on the other hand, was to totally
discredit the devotion to the shrine. He sought through his literary style to portray Lourdes as a
frenzied cult that merely validated the wild ideas of his time: the Freudian speculation about
hysteria, the Parisians hypnotic therapies, and even a bizarre idea about a certain magnetic force
of intercession. He also criticized the hygienic practices, especially multiple people bathing in
the same miraculous spring water, all with open sores.22 The careful yet zealous Boissarie then
admitted Zola to an exhibition, mostly against his better judgment, in which Zola would be
shown several patients who had been cured there, including a woman who had a severe
disfigurement and infection of the face, and then showed her beautiful cured face, but it seemed
only to fuel Zolas agenda.23 An interesting counterpoint was published by Charcot, who argued
that the healings at Lourdes were hysterical in nature because hysterics were affected by going
there. Hippolyte Bernheim (1840-1919) chimed in, supporting the repudiation of the
19
20
21
22
23

Harris, Lourdes, 327.

Ibid., 329-332.
Ibid., 330.
Ibid., 331-339.
Ibid., 340.

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suggestion theory while recognizing the limits of psychological therapies and the power of
faith beyond these sciences.24 Jean de Boucorps articulated a distinction that pilgrims seem to
make, precisely their faith in the existence of God and the revealed truths. ... and a blind faith
that they will be cured.25 For so many who have been cured at Lourdes, or through the
intercession of the Virgin from afar, this is the indisputable fact: they believed and were cured,
and their faith thus endures.
The debate between faith and science, and between clergy and doctors, raged on, but the
position of the Medical Board of Lourdes remains one of careful affirmation of both sides.
Medicine must accept its limits, beyond which faith alone may obtain a cure. Faith is called upon
to acknowledge the utility of the physical sciences to establish the baseline of human knowledge,
within which to recognize cures attributable to grace and the intercession of Our Lady of
Lourdes. Hence, at least at Lourdes, faith is scientific, and science is faithful.

24 Ibid., 350; and Brustolon, Dunot de Saint-Maclou, 463-65.

25 Ibid., 352.

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References
Brustolon-Glatz, P. Andrea. The extraordinary history of Baron Dr. Georges-Fernand Dunot de
St-Maclou and of the Bureau des Constatations Mdicales. Bulletin de lAssociations
Mdicale Internationale de Notre-Dame de Lourdes. Organe Officiel du Bureau des
Constatations Mdicales. 88 (330): 29-32.
Brustolon, Andrea. Georges-Fernand Dunot de Saint-Maclou: Il Dottore della Grotta. Gorle,
Italy: VELAR, 2014.
Harris, Ruth. Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age. New York: Viking, 1999.