12 Pilgrimage into Poverty I’m writing this month about Lourdes, and my fingers should tremble. Six million people visit the grotto every year. I’ve never been there. Franz Werfel, a Jew, wrote a fine book about Saint Bernadette’s visions, and how no one believed her at first, not even her family; how she was ridiculed, slapped in prison, called a fraud by skeptics; how she maintained her simple faith throughout; and her honest account of the facts. The journalist Malcolm Muggeridge—he who would introduce the world to Mother Teresa in the 1969 documentary Something Beautiful for God— accompanied a pilgrimage to Lourdes with his film crew in 1965. This was long before he and his wife entered the Church in their very old age. He didn’t witness what the Church, with her severe criteria, would certify as a miraculous cure. But he recalled the beauty of the place; the light shining in the eyes of a young lady, crippled and dying, whom he had met and spoken to as she went down to the waters. He believed, in a way he couldn’t yet describe, that Jesus the healer was present: “At Lourdes, too, bowing their heads, abating their twitchings, holding out their hands, if they have any, as the Blessed Sacrament approaches, they recall his healing
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