17 Pilgrimage into Poverty eternity that is wholly present in every smallest twitch of an atom. It’s no more difficult for God to make worlds than for him to make cells rush in multiplication and build up bone; each is as nothing at all, to God. When the flesh of Mary began to be knit in the womb of her mother Anne, what then was the work of God? He wrought a miracle, preserving Mary from that fall of Adam that is the shadow that falls upon each of us when we are conceived. We are born paralytics, hunched toward sin and death. Mary was born in full health of soul. She stood upright. Christ the healer By 1908, the fiftieth anniversary of the apparition of Mary to little Bernadette, the Lourdes researcher Georges Bertrin had counted 3,962 bodily cures. Only about one in fourteen of these were of nervous conditions. Many of the rest involved the inexplicable and immediate growth of healthy tissue. Bertrin says also that even if some of the cures were doubtful, a far greater number of cures were never recorded at all. France since the revolution had been riven by materialists on one side, who hated the Church and scoffed at the piety of ordinary people, and faithful Christians on the other. So the Lord raised up the small against the great. Think of the poor
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