The Catholic bulletin., 1918-11-30
LOURDES AND THE EUROPEAN Mind

HlLAiRE 5ELLoc TRACES IN
FLuENcES OF THE FAMOUS
sHRlNE-5RokE UP MATERl-
ALtsM-MADE skEPTlcs CON-
SlDER WHETHER THERE WAS
NOT WILL RATHER THAN MAT
TER BEHIND THE UNIVERSE
MIRACLES HAVE BEEN PROVl-
/ DENTAL IN THEIR TIME AND
METHOD.
The effect of Lourdes upon the mind
of Europe is the subject of an inter
esting study of Hilaire Belloc.
Some thirty or forty years ago, he
asks, what was the attitude towards
Lourdes? Among the Catholics were
those who said: Il am not bound by
the Faith to believe that miracles
have taken place at Lourdes.' The
non Catholic said: There is a place
called Lourdes to which superstitious
people go and think miracles are
worked, They do not take place at
all, and that is the end of it." Then
if they advanced twenty years they
would find a great change. The Cath
Ollie was quite convinced, and he was
proud of these miracles as triumph
of Our Lady and the Catholic Faith.
The non-C Catholic said: There is a
place called Lourdes to which pilgrim
ages take place of people who desire
to be cured of their ailments by what
they believe to be a miraculous or
magical water Certainly astonishing
things do take place, but they take
place through what l have been told
ito call 'auto-suggestion.' That was
the change. They no longer had the
skeptical Catholic apologizing as he
did twenty years before, and they no
longer had the nom n.Catholic denying
the objective reality of the Lourdes
miracles; and what others termed
objective reality" the Catholics called
the truth.
Europe and Miracles.
Lourdes was the thing that changed
the mind of modern Europe with re-
gard to miracles. Lourdes was the
first thing that broke up the old ma
terialism of what was called the Vic
torian Era. Lourdes it was that began
to make the mass of skeptical Europe
consider whether there was not will
rather than matter behind the uni
verse; and, although it was a matter
of which nobody could pretend to have
any specific knowledge, there was
something particularly providential
about the way in which the time and
the method Of the Lourdes miracles
were chosen. In putting that thesis
before them, Belloc warned them OF
the eccentricity, the aDnormality, the
apparent phantasy of the Catholic
point of view. His thesis was alb
normal, eccentric and individual but
he was quite determined on it, and he
thought it was one that posterity
would accept. They must first under
stand the state of mind in which
Europe was from 1916 to 1885; and
when he spoke of the mind of Europe,
he referred to that select body called
in Russia the "intelligenzia" and in
France the "intellectua4s.' The atti-
tude of these people was curiously
compounded of materialism and de-
terminism; they said that there was a
,, process or sequence in Nature which
excluded the action Of the will and
| the personality which were only d
function of matter. They denied i'm
picitly, the existence of a personal
! God; they certainly denied will at the
back of the universe, and hence they
denied miracles. Renan and Huxley
| converged in the ineradicable faith
| that what they called the processes
of the material world were unalter-
able, and, therefore, will was not pres
ent among them.
Upon this state of mind there fell
| the phenomenon of Lourdes in 1858.
| Il fell just at the moment when the
| adverse wave of materialism was at its
height. Lourdes was a special and
providential act, designed to convert,
change, upset and disintegrate the
materialism Of the nineteenth century.
| A peasant child-and a peasant was
thought the last word in unintelligence
-+said she had seen Our Lady. The
ecclesiastical authorities of the dis
tFiet regarded the statement as ex-
traragant and even absurd Then fol-
lowed certain miraculous cures. When
the ecclesiastical authorities said:
aThis thing is true, after ALL when
the pilgrimages began to increase,
when the cures could not be denied,
the "intellectuals" were troubled, and
at first with all the traditions of the
eighteenth century behind them, SIM
ply denied the phenomenon. Then
there came a certain phase in which
the thing could no longer be doubted.
There was taking place without a
doubt as an ordinary fact of daily