Religion and the ‘public/private’ problematic: the three ‘public’ spheres of the Lourdes pilgrimage

Abstract

The social significance of the Lourdes pilgrimage is examined in terms of the concept of ‘public/private’ spheres, as used by Junichi Saito (2000), who specifies three meanings that the concept ‘public’ has on the level of daily language use: a national or official aspect, a common or social aspect, and an aspect of openness and accessibility. The author’s purpose here is to clarify that the Lourdes pilgrimage movement brought these three public aspects to the fore in turn in response to contemporary problems – national identity, pauperism and the privatization of personal experiences of suffering – by taking advantage of the presence of the sick, that is, the spectacle of suffering in the ‘public space’ of the sanctuary of Lourdes.

Lourdes: sanctuary of the sick, spectacle of suffering

Lourdes is a Catholic pilgrimage centre established in France in the latter half of the 19th century. It is famous for its Marian apparition and miraculous cures, and thus a lot of research has been devoted to the study of these subjects. However, there have been comparatively few historical-anthropological studies on Lourdes as a great pilgrimage movement in the modern world. Thomas Kselman (1983), for example, emphasized the important role that the psychological effects of miracles and prophecies has played in enabling people to overcome social anxieties due to modernization. However, research into the history of the Lourdes pilgrimage has revealed that its significance is not limited to psychological effects. Furthermore, during the pilgrimage high season, it is the dominant presence of sick people that catches the eye – a sight that long been familiar. The 1980 edition of the Michelin guidebook, for example, began its description of Lourdes as follows:

Lourdes, the world famous religious city, shows its distinguishing feature in the summer, during the high season of pilgrimage. Rich ceremonies, processions and the presence of the sick expressing their ardent hopes give it a spiritual atmosphere. (Michelin, 1980: 122) ¹

Similarly, in the pilgrimage manual published under the direction of the National Association of the Directors of Diocesan Pilgrimages, the following phrase has appeared under the rubric of ‘the sick’:

In our towns and villages, the sick exist, but we hardly see them. At Lourdes, we see the sick; they are pilgrims like us. Don’t look at them out of curiosity, don’t photograph them, but try to meet them fraternally. (Ensemble à Lourdes, 1992: 49 [emphasis in the original])

In fact, Lourdes is known as a spectacle of suffering and is often criticized for its ‘exhibition of suffering’ (Malades à Lourdes, 1974: 199 ² ). However, the causes, effects and significance of this spectacle have never been elucidated.

In this paper, I examine the social significance of the Lourdes pilgrimage in terms of the concept of ‘public/private’ spheres, as used by Junichi Saito (2000: viii), who specifies three meanings that the concept ‘public’ has on the level of daily language use: 1) a national or official aspect that relates to a state and political system, the opposite of which is ‘civic’; 2) a common or social aspect referring to the common good and social services to meet people’s needs, as opposed to ‘private rights’; and 3) an aspect of openness, which does not exclude anyone and is open to everyone, in contrast with ‘privacy’.

Our purpose here is to clarify that the Lourdes pilgrimage movement brought these three public aspects to the fore in turn in response to contemporary problems by taking advantage of the presence of the sick, that is, the spectacle of suffering in the ‘public space’ of the sanctuary of Lourdes.

However, it is necessary to examine one important point prior to this. In current arguments on ‘publicness’, it is the above-mentioned third aspect, ‘openness’, that is discussed, with positive connotations. According to these arguments, only by being open and accessible does the ‘public’ sphere enable discussion that is intended to solve problems in society. Referring to Jürgen Habermas, José Casanova (1994), for example, argues for the possible role of religion in the problematic of ‘publicness’ and considers its role to include taking part in critical discussions on the ruling system, conducted in an open, public realm. However, as the purpose of this paper is not to discuss the desirability (or otherwise) of ‘publicness’, the concept of ‘public’ is not limited to the third aspect of ‘openness’.

Three historical stages of the ‘pilgrimage of the sick’

Suffering as redemption: the Association de Notre-Dame de Salut

It was the Pèlerinage National (National Pilgrimage), directed by the brothers of the Augustinians of the Assumption (Assumptionists) ³ and organized by the Association de Notre-Dame de Salut, that launched the pilgrimage of the sick in 1874, establishing today’s ‘spectacle of suffering’. In the Manuel-souvenir du Pèlerinage National à Lourdes of 1929, the aim of Father Picard, founder of the Association and the National Pilgrimage, was explained as follows:

he [Father Picard] had studied the plans for a vast Catholic League for the defence of the Church [whose] ‘associates would always be ready to defend the rights of the Church in society’ … [I]n the same spirit, a women’s association was established, which was first and foremost an association for prayer and social work but gradually gave rise to all kinds of charitable undertaking, such as national movements for faith and penitence; petitions for the Rights of God and the Church; public pilgrimages; various publications; an Educational Congress; aid for schools and asylums; etc. That was the Association de Notre-Dame de Salut. (Association de Notre-Dame de Salut, 1929: 263f)

In France in the 1870s, people who opposed the establishment of a Republican order and who desired the revival of the Ancien Régime went on pilgrimages to Chartres and Paray-le-Monial ⁴ , two national sanctuaries for French Catholics. In those days, the Republicans set forth their concept of history as a struggle that opposed an evil past based on unequal social classes with the Revolution as the birth of a future ideal society based on the principles of freedom and equality. Against this, the followers of the Catholic Church and the Ancien Régime interpreted the French Revolution as punishment by God because the king of France had not observed the contract with the Sacred Heart of Jesus; hence they multiplied pilgrimages to seek God’s forgiveness and the revival of the French Catholic kingdom. In other words, these pilgrimages were a means for the participants to affirm their sense of belonging to an encompassing ‘we’ that shared the common destiny of sinful past, present suffering and future salvation.

The pilgrimage of the sick arose precisely from this historical context. The members of the Association de Notre-Dame de Salut were asked to recruit sick, poor people from among the working classes in order to take them to Lourdes free of charge using donated funds. Father Vincent de Paul Bailly explained the aim of this pilgrimage in his annual general report, dated 2 February 1881, entitled La Rançon de la France (The Ransom of France):

Our Lady of Salvation then proposed that you pay the ransom through the involuntary suffering of sickness, rather than through the voluntary suffering that you offer so scantly, and asked you to raise this suffering to the illustrious rank of voluntary penitence by means of the generous sentiments you harbour towards the sick. … Terrible suffering was needed. … A greater number of sick, … a greater number of miracles … give us hope that Our Lady of Salvation has deemed them a ransom fit to offer her Son. (La Rançon de la France, 1881: 7–10)

This scenario of salvation relies on two concepts: first, the innocent suffering of poor workers, being victims of an unjust social system resulting from the Revolution, possess the same redemptive power as the pain that Jesus Christ submitted to on the Cross; second, the miraculous curing of these victims is proof that God has accepted the offering of suffering and that he has promised the salvation of France to the faithful. While the practice of the pilgrimage of the sick incarnated this double conception and was intended to reinforce such an interpretation of French history, it also aimed at forming a community, a national ‘we’, by receiving poor and sick workers united in the same destiny, and by making them enact an important role in the history of the salvation of France. The pilgrimage of the sick, a ritual for salvation, thus contested the Republican concept of history and opposed the authenticity of the ‘we’ of the Catholic against that of the Republican. The stake in this struggle was to seize the initiative, on the one hand forming a national community, and on the other a hermeneutics of ‘our’ history – that is to say, of identity.

The number of sick people who participated in the National Pilgrimage grew rapidly, reaching 959 in 1880; the average then stabilized, and the diocesan pilgrimages followed this example. ⁵ In the article ‘Notre-Dame de Lourdes in 1880’ that appeared in Annales de Notre-Dame de Lourdes, the bulletin of the sanctuary, was the following account: ⁶

The Pilgrimage of Notre-Dame de Lourdes has undergone, especially in the last three years, one of the biggest and the most touching transformations … [T]his year, a pilgrimage would not appear complete without the sick that have become, in a general way, its indispensable complements and its jewels. … The best and the quickest way to reform families and parishes may be a pilgrimage to Lourdes (Notre-Dame de Lourdes en 1880, 1880: 259, 262).

What is apparent in this passage is that the principal preoccupation of diocesan pilgrimages was to re-establish communal life rather than to save France; nevertheless, beyond this difference, the same desire for a communal framework dominated both the National Pilgrimage and diocesan pilgrimages.

From noblesse oblige to unconditional availability: the Hospitalité de Notre-Dame de Salut

The antagonism between Republican and Catholic followers over the communal framework for the French was brought to an end by the separation of Church and State in 1905 and by the national unification policies enacted during the First World War. However, the pilgrimage of the sick, far from declining, developed a new phase inaugurated by the Hospitalité de Notre-Dame de Salut.

At the beginning of the National Pilgrimage, the sick were tended to by the Petites Sœurs de l’Assomption and the members of an association named Dames Servantes des Pauvres (Servant Ladies of the Poor), which had been founded to assist the sisters. However, as the number of sick participating in the National Pilgrimage sharply increased in the 1880s, it became necessary to organize a group of volunteers to take care of them in order for the pilgrimages to run smoothly. In 1882, a service organization called Hospitalité de Notre-Dame de Salut emerged, the origin of which was narrated by André Rebsomen, ex-president of the organization, as follows (Rebsomen, [1930]: 34):

At that time, Reverend Father V. de P. Bailly explains, two sons of the Crusaders, Mr de l’Epinois and Mr de Combettes du Luc … had been moved [by the sight of the sick pilgrimage]. They went to see the director and asked, ‘Can we be of service to you?’

‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘Be the servants of the poor.’

For three days, they received a baptism of fire as the servants of charity. By the end of the pilgrimage, they were dedicated to their mission.

‘If you wish, we will make an army, like the Chevaliers Hospitaliers de Saint-Jean pour les malades de Jérusalem [Knight Hospitalers of Saint John for the sick in Jerusalem]. Would you bless our recruitment and greet us as the Frères du Salut [Brothers of Salvation]?’

‘Will you obey?’

‘From the heart.’

This anecdote shows that the Hospitalité de Notre-Dame de Salut was charged with the mission to revive a kind of order of chivalry. It was specified in the statutes that ‘upper-class people must set the example of devotion and sacrifice in France’ (Statuts et coutumiers de l’Hospitalité de N.-D. de Salut, 1885: 8). Thus the members were recruited from among the men of high society, with the object of restoring the traditional social bond between two separated and opposed classes, the rich and the poor, in accordance with the principle of noblesse oblige, meaning that a high social status carried with it responsibility for public welfare.

The Hospitalité de Notre-Dame de Salut was hence established not only for the practical purpose of taking care of sick pilgrims, but also for the promotion of social justice. On looking through the necrology of members, printed in a booklet in 1904 ⁷ , one notices that their memberships of the Society of St Vincent de Paul, of the Œuvre des Cercles Catholiques d’ouvriers [Catholic Circle of Workers] or of the Tiers Ordre Franciscain [Franciscan Third Order] were constantly mentioned. These three organizations were tied to the current of social Catholicism, whose solicitude was concentrated on pauperism, undermining French society of that time. In contrast with the Republican way – attempting to respond to social needs with economic relief programmes provided by the État-providence (welfare state) – some followers of social Catholicism undertook to remedy the situation by calling on community ethics that had inspired charitable work under the Ancient Régime. They thought that charitable activities, offered by upper-class people who deemed this to be their social obligation, would unite people of unequal classes by nurturing positive feelings of solidarity: charity on the part of the rich, respect for them on the part of the poor. Thus the activities of the Hospitalité de Notre-Dame de Salut were at first planned as manifestations of such charity, and it is for this reason that at the beginning it had to be an organization not of women but of men, endowed with social responsibility and ‘visibility’.

However, as time passed, this political concern was modified by the following three factors: first, the increasing participation of women in the activities of the Hospitalité de Notre-Dame de Salut; second, the foundation, official since 1885, of the Hospitalité Notre-Dame de Lourdes under the direction of the fathers of the sanctuary; and third, adaptations of this hospitality system by diocesan pilgrimages that got under way in the 1920s. All these factors contributed to the diversification of Hospitalité members, which resulted in the modification of the initial intentions of the founders of Hospitalité de Notre-Dame de Salut: on the one hand, the creation of ‘feminine’ branches influenced not only the organization’s political aims, but also its dominant masculine character; and the participation of the common and the labouring classes made it impossible to maintain the dream of reconciling classes in conflict, a dream based on the paternalistic ideal of noblesse oblige. Begun with the aim of contributing directly to public welfare, Hospitalité activities became so-called ‘personal matters’.

The creation of the Hospitalité Notre-Dame de Lourdes had a significant effect not only on the activities of Hospitalités generally, but more widely in the world of the pilgrimages of the sick. While the members of the Hospitalité de Notre-Dame de Salut and those of other diocesan hospitalities had only to support their own sick pilgrims, the Hospitalité Notre-Dame de Lourdes, which belonged not to a particular pilgrimage group but to the sanctuary, was not bound by ‘communal intimacy’. Although it initially had some difficulty in designating the sick to be assisted, the experience led to a claim that its members should be ‘disponible’ (ready) to respond to the calls of all ‘unrelated’ sick people. Thus the fact of not having its own ‘we’ meant that the Hospitalité Notre-Dame de Lourdes was in a position to broaden the notion of ‘others’, from ‘close others’ to ‘alien others’. The principle of the activities of the Hospitalité then passed from noblesse oblige, an internal obligation uniting the community members, to a norm of unconditional ‘disponibilité’ (availability).

With this new norm, the world of the Hospitalité came to disregard not only the concept of social obligation aimed at members of a community, but also the goal of reviving community ethics under the Ancien Régime. Despite this turnaround, the criticism that social relations had been reduced to economic relations by unpaid benevolent behaviour was maintained. Furthermore, the requirement of ‘unconditional availability’, demanded at first only of the hospitality members, came to exert an influence upon the ensemble of the world of the Lourdes pilgrimage. Nowadays, participants in this world speak often and naturally of ‘being available’, both as an appraisal of others and as an attitude required of themselves.

The activities of hospitalities opposed the dominant social norms in two further respects: with regard to gender norms and with regard to the medicalization of society. First, the ethic of unconditional availability was close to the virtue of empathy that in 19th-century France was considered to be the essence of women and a component of the family unit. ⁸ By imposing this ‘feminine nature’ on male participants, the activities of hospitalities led to the feminization of the world of the pilgrimages of the sick. Second, medical doctors in 19th-century France performed the social role of public health administrators, in the interest of social productivity, and were the only people that the sick could refer to. Opposing this tendency, hospitalities’ activities took sick people out of the hands of doctors and liberated them from playing the role of ‘good patients’. It should be added that Catholic doctors supported the ‘publicness’ of the Lourdes pilgrimage, advocating the free will of sick people – which could hardly be approved from the viewpoint of enhancing productivity.

It may be worth pointing out that the significance of miraculous cures with regard to the scientific world view promulgated in the modern world is related to this attitude of unconditional availability. Medical research and the testimony of miraculés ⁹ – those whose diseases and wounds have been cured ‘miraculously’ – reveal first that a miraculous cure is perceived to be a consequence of the discontinuation of sequential phenomena occasioned by the grace of God, which comes suddenly from outside a suffering person, and second that images of the world and human beings that are open to external divine favours are highly valued. ¹⁰ A person will be cured because he makes himself ‘available’ to the grace of God. A miracle cure conceived in these terms opposes not only the fundamental principle underlying a modern, scientific world view, but also the value of self identity, stable and closed to outside influences – a value demanded in modern society. On the contrary, researchers who analyze miraculous cures at Lourdes often explain their mechanism as the recovery of the human ‘wholeness’ and of the ‘unity’ of self. ¹¹ However, such explanations are not appropriate, as they uncritically resort to the concept of a stable and complete ‘identity’ regarded as a ‘universal’ ideal value, ignoring the context in which cures occur.

Unction of the Sick: questioning the exclusion and ‘privatization’ of suffering

After the Second World War, the third public aspect, according to our definition, came into the foreground of the pilgrimages of the sick as the voices of the sick began to be heard. In particular in the 1970s the pastoral care of the sick was reviewed in the spirit of Vatican Council II, and Lourdes became a privileged field of this evolution because of the predominant presence of the sick. As a result of this review, the sick gradually obtained opportunities to speak out freely and for the first time expressed their wish to have more contact with the healthy, instead of being treated as offerings for God, as expressed by the common appellation ‘Nos seigneurs les malades [Our lords the sick]’. On the other hand, Lourdes was chosen as the principal field of the reform of a sacrament called ‘Unction of the Sick’. ¹² In the reports kept at the Archives of the Sanctuary of Lourdes, one notices that studies of this reform deepened reflection on the ‘unproductive’ aspects of human life, making people aware of the necessity to integrate them not only into their personal life but also into their social life. As a result of this, the purpose of the pilgrimage of the sick deviated from the original intention of offering God the sufferings of the sick and became to live together and to face the suffering of others instead of avoiding them. With this, the number of pilgrimages of the sick and the handicapped organized by either themselves or their supporters increased. The participants’ longing was to be seen and heard in this common, public space of the sanctuary of Lourdes, a space open to everybody and where the spectacle of the sick had been unfolding since its origins, so that their existence would finally be widely recognized. Examples that stand out are the pilgrimage of mentally handicapped children, entitled Foi et Lumière (Faith and Light), and that of cancer patients, known as Lourdes Cancer Espérence (Lourdes Cancer Hope).

These pilgrimages challenge the position of the sick and the handicapped as being excluded from communal life, and oppose the ‘propriety’ of this exclusion; people pretend to protect the private lives of the sick and their families by isolating them in their private suffering. In contemporary society, which seeks productivity above all other values, disability, disease, senility and death are excluded from the public arena as ‘private’ affairs. In order to call into question this value system, the pilgrimages of the sick and the handicapped are trying to create an opportunity for those who are suffering and those who are not suffering to live together by exposing the ‘private affairs’ of each other to the public eye in an open space. It seems reasonable to suppose that the formation of this public space, where no one is excluded and everyone is eligible to participate, has been achieved by the creation of the previously mentioned norm of unconditional availability, which has oriented the world of Lourdes pilgrimages for many years.

The three ‘public’ aspects of the pilgrimage of the sick

The history of the pilgrimages of the sick at Lourdes can be considered to be a continuous movement in which organizers have ensured that the Catholic world remains public by responding to the most urgent social needs of each period through the medium of sick people.

This movement began as a Catholic mission to predominate over the Republic with regard to the first aspect of ‘publicness’, by claiming the official and just power to frame French communal life and to authenticate national history. The movement then appeared to correspond to the second aspect of publicness, its common or social aspect, insofar as the supporters of social Catholicism, being conscious of their public responsibility, attempted to take the initiative for the sake of the public benefit and tried to resolve social problems by establishing better relations between two classes that were opposed economically and spiritually. Now, in the same field of the Lourdes pilgrimage, the time has come for the sick and the handicapped to engender a space open to all suffering individuals. However, their appeal may be considered an attempt to create an alternative public space to the public arena of deliberations, where openness is demanded as indispensable. The space referred to here is the ‘space of appearance’ as defined by Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition (1998), rather than the ‘public sphere’ in the sense of Jürgen Habermas’s discussion.

The difference between the space of appearance according to Arendt and that which has unfolded in Lourdes cannot be dealt with here in detail, so I will limit my discussion to the two following points. First, these spaces differ in attitude towards the human body, especially towards the suffering inherent in the human condition of being corporeal. Although giving ‘the space of appearance’ a connotation of an open space for every individual, aside from political discussions, Hannah Arendt still defines it as a space of discourse, and considers it inappropriate and unfeasible to include life phenomena in this space – in particular physical suffering, which can hardly be expressed in words (Arendt, 1998: 50–58, 112–115). In contrast, the ‘space of appearance’ of the pilgrimage of the sick is oriented towards physical suffering. ¹³ Second, two ‘spaces of appearance’ are characterized as having in common a ‘difference’ that separates their participants from one another, but nevertheless it is necessary to distinguish between types of ‘difference’. Arendt divides ‘difference’ into two types – ‘distinctness’ and ‘alteritas’. She defines ‘distinctness’, an attribute of her ‘space of appearance’, as an active difference, which is engendered as the fruition of human initiative executed through discussion and action (Arendt, 1998: 176). ‘Alteritas’, on the contrary, is defined as a passive – negative – ‘otherness’, which is common to every being. However, it is this very ‘otherness’ inherent to the condition of being that is required as an effective – positive – ‘difference’ in the space of appearance of Lourdes. Considered as an agent of this ‘otherness’ by the fact of being incomprehensible and incommunicable, corporeal suffering is thus excluded from the space of appearance for Arendt, whereas it is welcomed at Lourdes.

On the other hand, the central role of suffering in the pilgrimages of the sick has varied during history. At first an official ‘sacrifice’, it was subsequently treated as a common social problem to be resolved by deliberation and is now considered to be a factor which renders the participants in the world of a Lourdes pilgrimage to be ‘available’. This evolution led to the differentiation of three attitudes towards suffering: as something that could be ‘utilized’, as something that was to be ‘resolved’, and as something that had to be ‘lived with’. At the same time, it modified the nature of the public space of Lourdes. Presented at the beginning as a public space connected with national history, diocesan networks, public welfare, the upper classes and their social responsibility, it was subsequently transformed into an open space where the weak, stigmatized by their unproductiveness, could appear, the Unction of the Sick was practised and all participants would seek to be ‘available’.

In conclusion, the causes, effects and significance of the spectacle of suffering at Lourdes can be related to the conceptual problematic of ‘public/private’. One final point should be made about the possible role of religion in the problematic of ‘publicness’. While José Casanova conceives it as active participation in deliberations on social justice, what is occurring in the space of appearance at Lourdes seems to suggest another part that religion could play in this problematic by offering a public space, in which the human realities defined as ‘private’ in modern society – such as senility and death, the suffering inherent in the human condition that can never be resolved by deliberation – can be liberated from the social norm, which excludes these human experiences from the public sphere and deprives those who are suffering of social interaction.