Article: Review - Books: The girl who saved France's soul Eamon Duffy on the wide-ranging influence of St Bernadette's visions at Lourdes

Lourdes: Body and Spirit

in the Secular Age

by Ruth Harris Penguin/Allen Lane, pounds 25, 473 pp ON 11 FEBRUARY, 1858 a 14-year-old shepherdess named Bernadette Soubirous, scavenging for firewood near a riverside cave outside the small Pyrenean town of Lourdes, was attracted by a mysterious light within the grotto. She saw there a smiling child dressed in white. Neither spoke, but both prayed on their rosary beads till the vision, whom Bernadette would call Aquero, the heavenly one, disappeared. This was the first of 18 apparitions, in the course of which Bernadette would scratch in the swampy ground a hole which was to become the source of the greatest healing spring in the history of ...

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