…I thought I would re-tell the tale of Alexis Carrel’s encounter with God through the private revelation vouchsafed him at Lourdes. I am perfectly confident that the world absolutely abounds in such weird encounters, all of them unique, few of them discussed because the recipient feels weird talking about it, and countless numbers of them quietly bearing fruit in countless human hearts. In the Catholic tradition, there is no requirement that we take such things as part of the public revelation. So a Catholic is free to not believe in the apparition at Lourdes or in the claims about any other private revelation. For myself, (I believe in the apparation at Lourdes for the same reason I think Booth shot Lincoln: because the historical evidence for it seems solid and because I think only a philosophical prejudice against the possibility of the miraculous accounts for rejection of that evidence.
The interesting pastoral problem the Church needs to take seriously is the fact that, for the person who has an experience of private revelation (whether genuine or imaginary, and that is often hard to discern), it may well constitute the central and defining event in their life and in their understanding of God., as this event clearly did for Carrel.
Here’s the story (from my book MARY, MOTHER OF THE SON:
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Nineteenth-century France turned out splendid atheists. There was nothing half-baked about a nineteenth-century French atheist. When he left the Catholic faith, he didn’t shilly-shally around with Protestantism or the religious methadone treatment called Unitarianism. He went straight for hard-boiled materialism that declared the supernatural to be bunk.
One such man was Alexis Carrel, a nineteenth-century doctor who won the Nobel prize in Medicine in 1912. Raised a Catholic, Carrel had, by 1900, rejected all supernatural belief and become a committed atheistic materialist. But he also believed in investigating facts rather than simply imposing ideology on things. So in 1902, he accompanied a doctor friend to the shrine at Lourdes where, it was said, the Blessed Virgin had appeared to a girl named Bernadette Soubirous in 1858. There were many stories of miraculous cures at the shrine as sick people washed in or drank from a spring that had been dug there by Bernadette. Profoundly skeptical, Carrel wanted to see for himself. So he boarded a train for Lourdes—and met Marie Bailly. Fr. Stanley Jaki tells the story:
Marie Bailly was born in 1878. Both her father . . . and her mother died of tuberculosis. Of her five siblings only one was free of that disease. She was twenty when she first showed symptoms of pulmonary tuberculosis. A year later she was diagnosed with tuberculous meningitis, from which she suddenly recovered when she used Lourdes water. In two more years, in 1901, she came down with tubercular peritonitis. Soon she could not retain food. In March 1902 doctors in Lyons refused to operate on her for fear that she would die on the operating table.
On May 25, 1902, she begged her friends to smuggle her onto a train that carried sick people to Lourdes. She had to be smuggled because, as a rule, such trains were forbidden to carry dying people. The train left Lyons at noon. At two o’clock next morning she was found dying. Carrel was called. He gave her morphine by the light of a kerosene lamp and stayed with her. Three hours later he diagnosed her case as tuberculous peritonitis and said half aloud that she would not arrive in Lourdes alive. The immediate diagnosis at that time largely depended on the procedure known as palpation. In Lourdes Marie Bailly was examined by several doctors. On May 27 she insisted on being carried to the Grotto, although the doctors were afraid that she would die on the way there. Carrel himself took such a grim view of her condition that he vowed to become a monk if she reached the Grotto alive, a mere quarter of a mile from the hospital.
The rest is medical history. It is found in Dossier 54 of the Archives of the Medical Bureau of Lourdes. The dossier contains the immediate depositions by three doctors, including Carrel, and Marie Bailly’s own account, which she wrote in November and gave to Carrel, who then duly forwarded it to the Medical Bureau in Lourdes.
The highlights of Marie Bailly’s own account are as follows: On arriving at the baths adjoining the Grotto, she was not allowed to be immersed. She asked that some water from the baths be poured on her abdomen. It caused her searing pain all over her body. Still she asked for the same again. This time she felt much less pain. When the water was poured on her abdomen the third time, it gave her a very pleasant sensation.
Meanwhile Carrel stood behind her, with a notepad in his hands. He marked the time, the pulse, the facial expression and other clinical details as he witnessed under his very eyes the following: The enormously distended and very hard abdomen began to flatten and within thirty minutes it had completely disappeared. No discharge whatsoever was observed from the body.
She was first carried to the Basilica, then to the Medical Bureau, where she was again examined by several doctors, among them Carrel. In the evening she sat up in her bed and had a dinner without vomiting. Early next morning she got up on her own and was already dressed when Carrel saw her again.
Carrel could not help registering that she was cured. What will you do with your life now? Carrel asked her. I will join the Sisters of Charity to spend my life caring for the sick, was the answer. The next day she boarded the train on her own, and after a twenty-four-hour trip on hard benches, she arrived refreshed in Lyons. There she took the streetcar and went to the family home, where she had to prove that she was Marie Bailly indeed, who only five days earlier had left Lyons in a critical condition.
Carrel continued to take a great interest in her. He asked a psychiatrist to test her every two weeks, which was done for four months. She was regularly tested for traces of tuberculosis. In late November she was declared to be in good health both physically and mentally. In December she entered the novitiate in Paris. Without ever having a relapse she lived the arduous life of a Sister of Charity until 1937, when she died at the age of 58.[1]
Carrel was caught between two worlds. As an atheistic materialist, he didn’t want to be identified with what he regarded as the gullible hoi polloi who believed this stunning cure to be a miracle from heaven. But as an honest man, Carrel simply couldn’t ignore what he saw, as many in the French medical establishment insisted he should do. For many years, Carrel tried to distance himself from both groups and tried to ascribe Marie’s healing to gobbledygook about “psychic forces” and various other lame naturalistic explanations. But at the end of his life, Carrel finally received the sacraments of the Church and died reconciled to God.
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There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
—Hamlet, Act 1, Scene V
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