Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age

This is a deftly balanced history of religious pilgrimage to the small town of Lourdes in the foothills of the French Pyrenees. Harris crafts a book that simultaneously provides a historical context of the pilgrimage for religious readers and constructs an interpretive model for nonbelievers that will enable them to sympathize with the appeal of the tradition rather than dismiss it as ignorant superstition. Lourdes became the focal point for pilgrimage by Catholic followers of the Virgin Mary after a 14-year-old girl named Bernadette Soubirous began having visions of a figure (who identified herself as the Immaculate Conception) in a grotto in 1858. Harris, a historian at Oxford University (Murders and Madness: Medicine, Law, and Society in the Fin de Si cle), accomplishes her goal of respecting the religious tradition of the site while offering a dense social history of what appears to be a cultural paradox--the growing popularity of the shrine during periods of rapid secularization--by contextualizing the pilgrimage within the broader histories of the French nation, the Catholic church and the worldwide Marianist movement. One of the more interesting features she analyzes is the constant interplay between strong religious women and male authority figures throughout the history of the increasing popularity of the shrine. Harris also explores the interdependent relationship between positivistic science and the spirituality represented by the grotto, and she challenges the notion that the two remain in clear and perpetual opposition. A deceptively easy read, this is in fact a complex and sensitive history that refuses to dehumanize religious believers. Photos not seen by PW. (Nov.)