Cynics denounce it as a religious theme park. An Oxford don calls
it a scene of mass delusion. But Lourdes — the 19th-century
shrine in southern France — still pulls in the faithful at a
steady rate of about 6 million people a year, thousands of them
in wheelchairs.
The visitors seem unperturbed by jibes from
outsiders.
The Lourdes grotto has withstood disparagement since its
inception in 1858 when the Church itself challenged a peasant
girl’s visions of the Madonna. After a few years, though, the
apparitions were declared genuine and the legend has
persisted.
I was drawn there recently by simple intellectual
curiosity, not by my status as a “fallen-away Catholic.” I have
always been intrigued at how this phenomenal site never goes away
despite the secular age in which we live and the rise of medical
science.
Physicist Freeman Dyson, addressing the larger debate
between science and religion, pleads for an open mind. He has
written that both camps are “one-sided, neither is
complete, both leave out essential features of the real world.
And both are worthy of respect.”
Undoubtedly, at the very least Lourdes benefits today from
an increase in attention to the sick and handicapped, ranging
from sidewalk ramps to public parking spaces. The entire town has
been constructed to make life easier for visitors needing special
facilities to move about.
Yet try spending a few days there. The earmarks of a theme
park, including long lines to see the grotto and a range of cheap
souvenirs for the folks at home, are unmistakable. Oxford Prof.
Richard Dawkins featured Lourdes in a recent British television
documentary. The best he could find to say is that “delusions”
can be comforting when experienced on such a grand scale.
Behind the scenes of adulation, however, cooler heads are
wrestling with the fundamentals — the contradictions between
Lourdes’ alleged healing powers and the realities of modern
medicine. Confirmed extraordinary healings have dropped off
steadily as medical science progresses, making certification of
“miracle cures” increasingly difficult.
Only four cases of unexplained cures have been accepted by
the church as “miraculous” in the past 40 years, compared to one
every couple of years in the first hundred years. Many of the
older cases were based on such disorders as tuberculosis and
osteoporosis that are treatable now. As cures have developed,
Lourdes cases are limited to such maladies as terminal cancers
and multiple sclerosis.
And so the time has come to adapt, say the forward-thinking
medical and religious leaders of the site.
First, they are concerned to apply science, thereby
distancing themselves from such healers as fringe cults and
television evangelists. Indeed, they downplay talk of miraculous
properties of the waters, focusing instead on the palliative
effects of the shared spiritual experience.
DR. ALESSANDRO FRANCISCIS, a Harvard-educated M.D. and son
of an Italian father and American mother, is the new full-time
doctor on the scene. An affable, relaxed protector of the
scientific side of the site, he starts by telling me “I am not
here to build ‘miracles,’” wiggling his fingers in air quotes as
he pronounces the M-word. “I am here to determine what
happened.”
Second, they believe in rigor. To this end, Dr. Franciscis
maintains a structured investigative process to weed out
attention-seekers, people who may be benefitting from previous
medical treatment, and the delusional. In his first year, just
completed, he personally interviewed 38 claimants, deciding to
follow up just six or seven of them.
The follow-up process relies on scientific enquiry to
determine whether a healing is explainable or not. It begins with
Dr. Franciscis calling in the person who has had the experience.
He or she is seated before an ad hoc panel of doctors — some
believers, some not — who happen to be visiting Lourdes at the
time. Dr. Franciscis presides.
“The questioning and the follow-up can be hard to bear,”
says Dr. Franciscis. “Some people choose not to subject
themselves to it.” Medical reports, x-rays and CAT scans from the
individual’s past are requisitioned, further examinations are
required, and periodic tests are scheduled to confirm that the
cure was real and lasting. Only if Dr. Franciscis feels something
extraordinary has happened does he create a file and pursue the
case.
Being a scientist, he withdraws from a case once his
investigation is complete. If it passes his tests as a cure
unknown in current medical literature, it becomes a religious
question. Any prospect of declaring a miracle is the
responsibility of the bishop in the patient’s home diocese — and
many are reluctant today to take that controversial step.
A scientist by training, Dr. Franciscis strives to
understand both sides. He declares religion to be “irrational, by
definition” but says science alone cannot explain some of the
occurrences at Lourdes either.
In our chat, while fielding several calls on his cell
phone, he did his best to reconcile his expertise with claims of
Lourdes recoveries. Echoing Freeman Dyson, he said he finds
medical science and religion to be “somewhat fundamentalist.”
Reason, he believes, can be found in between. “They can enlighten
each other.”
He cites medicine’s recent blind spots as the promise of
the human genome project to cure disease, and the failure to find
a cure for AIDS, “both of which were confidently predicted ten
years ago and both of which have failed to deliver.”
Freeman Dyson warns of the dangers of a dialogue of the
deaf. “Trouble arises when either science or
religion claims universal jurisdiction, when either religious or
scientific dogma claims to be infallible. Religious creationists
and scientific materialists are equally dogmatic and
insensitive.”
Meanwhile, Dr. Franciscis sees Lourdes staying relevant in
today’s cynical society. “I see something moving in the change of
public attitudes,” he said. “Society is putting the needs of the
sick at the center of life.”
The local bishop, Monsignor Jacques Perrier, feels that
visitors gain spiritual comfort regardless of the medical
outcome. He wrote in a recent book “Lourdes Today and Tomorrow”
that Lourdes doesn’t need miracles. In fact, he
added, “miracles are now very rare but the number of pilgrims
visiting Lourdes keeps on rising.”
