Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age. - book by Ruth Harris - Brief Article - book review

National Catholic Reporter, June 15, 2001 by Moni Mcintryre

The late Jesuit philosopher/historian Michel de Certeau spoke of the "mystical" as "a reaction against the appropriation of truth by the clerics," favoring "the illuminations of the illiterate, the experience of women, the wisdom of fools, the silence of the child."

Ruth Harris, in Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age (Penguin USA), has lovingly retold the story of Lourdes as a mystical eruption in which women and children played pivotal roles as usurping visionaries.

The new "clerics" of positivistic science in the late 19th century placed women's bodies on the front lines of an anti-clerical struggle. Did trances and visions come from unseen metaphysical causes? Or were they merely -- as the "hysteria diagnosis" implied -- surface manifestations of neurological impulses?

Harris situates Lourdes within this larger historical context of a culture war between religion, science and medicine. A sophisticated story told in accessible and engaging prose (and with numerous illustrations), Lourdes will open the eyes of both believers and skeptics to the complex dimensions of what was at stake in late 19th-century religious struggles. Although set within political battles waged at high institutional levels and the emergent scientific establishment, Harris keeps her story focused on "one fixed point: the essential image of a young, poverty-stricken and sickly girl kneeling in ecstasy in a muddy grotto." An unlikely yet formidable icon of resistance, Bernadette's irreducible wonder stood over and against the arriviste clerics' appropriation Of truth.

The Rev. Moni McIntyre teaches at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh.