Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating but ....
Review: Harris has written a very detailed and historically accurate account of the Shrine at Lourdes and its development. I gained a better understanding of the historical tension between Republican and secular France versus religious and Catholic France. However,the author tips her hand when it comes to her bias. She admits in the preface that she initially found the phenomena of Lourdes "repugnant". Whilst I can understand that she may not be a believer,the term "repugnant" seems an oddly harsh one. Her knowledge of Catholic theology is pathetic for an Oxford scholar writing on the world's greatest shrine. She apparently believes that the Immaculate Conception refers to the Virgin Birth. Worth reading but be aware that she has her own agenda.She struggles to potray the inhabitants of the rural France in a fair manner,but it's apparent she thinks they are a bunch of flea ridden dummies.

Rating:
Summary: Thinly-veiled anti-Catholicism from cover to cover
Review: Having received an Amazon gift certificate, I eagerly a sought book on Lourdes which I had not yet read. I came upon Ruth Harris' book, surprised that I had never seen mention of it in any Catholic literature. Indeed, each and every one of the rave reviews in the book is from secular sources, and scant wonder. The book is an unabashed attack on Catholicism from beginning to end. The author seems bent on depicting the Lourdes phenomenon as being made possible primarily because of a deeply-rooted pagan or earth-based folk spirituality beneath a forced, thin veneer of orthodox Catholicism. The author consistently uses the term "Counter-Reformation" as synonymous with 19th century orthodox Catholic culture, as if to imply that this culture was largely reactionary and paranoid, and sets out to portray the true believers at Lourdes as being in opposition with and repressed by the orthodox Catholic hierarchy. In spite of her reviewers' awe of her "elegant scholarship," she makes incredible leaps of interpretation. For example, in describing how people over the years have been led by stray cattle and other animals to discover miraculous hidden statues of the Virgin Mary, Harris concludes that the presence of animals in these tales and their wooded settings must indicate a pagan sensibility. She gives a sexual interpretation to the anecdote of a bull licking a statue of the Blessed Virgin. With this kind of thinking, Harris would probably look upon the story of St. Francis and the Wolf and determine that St. Francis must really be a pagan at heart! Furthermore, when she insists that when these statues are placed in local churches and miraculously find their way back to their hidden forest "homes", this proves their defiance and rejection of the institutional Church, an assumption made in apparent ignorance of the fact that, on the contrary, the Church seeks to spread truth and devotion to all remote and hidden corners of the world, and generally builds chapels and shrines upon the sites of such miraculous findings-- of which Lourdes itself is a supreme example! In one chapter on the Lourdes visionary Bernadette Soubirous, Harris compares her with another young, female, 19th-century French saint, St. Therese of Lisieux. Flying in the face of historical records which verify the unusual, almost idyllic happiness of the Martin family, Harris averts to modern psychobabble and describes them as "tormented", and criticizes the fact that Therese was interested in political happenings only to the extent that they offered the promise of converting the heathen-- as if this was not incredibly rare and laudable in someone so young. She makes the unsubstantiated remark that the Martin parents "taught the children to accept without question the perceived conspiratorial links between Freemasonry, Jews, and the devil," just one in a series of gratuitous potshots at some fantasized Catholic anti-Semitism. Deciding that she must know more than the Catholic Church who declared St. Therese a Doctor of the Church the year before her own book's publication, Harris makes the common blunder of mistaking Therese's concept of 'spiritual childhood' for childishness, and amazingly states that this led to Therese's perception of "God as mother." Though Harris does use some original documents in her research, claims of the more spurious kind are most often based not on these primary historical sources but on articles written by other, similar modern scholars with similar "modern" agendas. Her supposed admiration for Lourdes seems based primarily on its social-work dimension of volunteers helping the sick. I can honestly say that, other reviewers' raves about Harris' scholarship aside, I feel I learned little in the way of undistorted fact aside from her several mentions that St. Bernadette Soubirous had fleas.

Rating:
Summary: Reductionist and Condescending
Review: Ruth Harris purports to write a scholarly treatment of Lourdes. Clearly, scholarly in her sense of the term means a rejection of the actual faith which underlies the history of Lourdes and most of the people who go on pilgrimage there. It is a common ploy today for intellectuals who reject the faith itself and are in fact hostile to it to disguise their true dispositions by characterizing simple believers as adherents to some kind of folk beliefs independent of the actual content of Catholicism. In this way, Harris is able to attack Catholicism itself but appear to respect phenomena such as visions, miracles and those who believe in them. The latter are cast into the framework of common folk thinking and acting independent of the hierarchically-constituted Church. Harris' Lourdes exists only in her imagination and in the confines of the intellectual constructs she imposes on it. It is similar in vein to those who cast Our Lady of Guadalupe into the framework of syncretism, that is, the common people subverting Catholicism by mixing it with pagan elements. The truth is known to be otherwise for those who are careful to study the history. Lourdes and Guadalupe are towering monuments to Catholic orthodoxy. Harris' perspective has nothing to do with the actual dispositions of Saint Bernadette Soubirous and the millions who have followed her to the grotto in Lourdes. This work will impress those who know little about Lourdes or Bernadette and are predisposed to Harris' psychological and sociological reductionism. I might add that a work purporting to be objective would have considered more carefully the extensive scientific evidence. Those interested in the real Lourdes and the real Bernadette should read the works of Rene Laurentin, the best Lourdes scholar.