Lourdes: Miracle City
13’ 45”
Procession at Lourdes | Singing | 00:00 |
HUTCHEON: Some in the Church say we’re at the dusk of faith. | 00:10 | |
The Pope has made it his mission to revive Catholicism throughout Europe, but while the Church is worried, no such concerns exist here. | 00:19 | |
In Lourdes, belief is booming. | 00:32 | |
Pilgrims kiss stone at shrine | <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> | 00:40 |
| It’s the anniversary of the event that put Lourdes on the map. | 00:50 |
Incredibly, eight million pilgrims are expected this year. | 00:57 | |
Pilgrims at grotto | This is the grotto where the Virgin Mary is said to have appeared. Now it’s a shrine where the sick and the dying are especially welcomed. For some, it’s an extremely emotional experience. | 01:03 |
Statue of Virgin | Music | 01:22 |
Lourdes shots | HUTCHEON: In the town of Lourdes you won’t find sceptics, because pilgrims mean big business.. | 01:31 |
Tourists shop | Music | 01:38 |
HUTCHEON: Beyond the religious sanctuary, it’s a Catholic Disneyland where blatant commercialism thrives. Pilgrims outnumber locals by five to one, but tourism isn’t the draw. The faithful believe Lourdes is filled with a deeply spiritual force, the power to cure body and soul | 01:47 | |
Tom with son | HUTCHEON: What do you come here for? TOM DOHERTY: For a miraculous cure. I’ve got three children, two with cystic fibrosis and I’ve got him with Downs Syndrome. HUTCHEON: Tom Doherty has been here more than | 02:21 |
twenty times. His son Johnny is five and suffers debilitating complications. | 02:32 | |
TOM DOHERTY: The cure is in the water in the well, not in the walls, but in the water and the well. HUTCHEON: You’re convinced of that? TOM DOHERTY: Oh yeah, one hundred, one hundred and ten per cent, fully convinced. | 02:40 | |
Pilgrims at spring |
| 02:51 |
HUTCHEON: Some believe the spring water is sacred. Others say prayers to the Virgin Mary can bring about a miracle cure. WOMAN PILGRIM: I was diagnosed | 02:55 | |
Woman pilgrim | with cancer in my throat and I was healed, my miraculous medal fell down that morning and when they took the tumour out, there was no cancer. I mean those are just testimonies of what Our Lady has been doing for me. | 03:06 |
Pilgrims at cave | FATHER MARTIN MORAN: Lots of people come looking for, you know, a miracle | 03:31 |
Hutcheon walks with Father Martin | for…. tend not for themselves as such, but for other people. HUTCHEON: Father Martin Moran is a Chaplain at Lourdes. He explains how a hundred and fifty years ago, a local country girl, who later became Saint Bernadette, saw a series of apparitions while collecting firewood in a grotto. | 03:34 |
Father Martin | FATHER MARTIN MORAN: Bernadette heard a rustle in the wind, | 03:56 |
‘Apparition’ sequence | and she felt something and she looked up and in the niche of the rock behind us here, she saw this figure of a woman dressed in white with a blue sash and the woman told her I am the Immaculate Conception. The Church is extremely slow to | 03:58 |
Father Martin. Super: | verify something like that, because people you know in this day and age with people seeing the face of Jesus on toast and pizzas and everything, so things like that have to be really, really verified and she would have gone | 04:17 |
Statue of Virgin | through quite a lot of scrutiny in order to, you know, to have that verified because both the Church | 04:27 |
Father Martin | and the civil authorities were very sceptical of what she claimed to have seen. | 04:34 |
Pilgrims in wheelchairs in town square | Music | 04:40 |
<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> | HUTCHEON: For more than a century, pilgrims, particularly the sick, have flocked to Lourdes to venerate Mary, the Mother of Jesus. Many are convinced their prayers to the Virgin have been answered. PEADAR CLARKE: Every time that I | 04:53 |
Peadar. Super: | return to Lourdes, I feel I’m walking in the footsteps of that little insignificant girl, and it makes me feel how insignificant I am, and it makes me feel wow! This is magic! | 05:11 |
Photos of Peadar | HUTCHEON: In the 1980s doctors, pronounced Irishman Peadar Clarke incurable. His body and mind were riddled with multiple sclerosis and he was given just four years to live. | 05:27 |
Lourdes town | Brought to Lourdes as a very sick man, one night | 05:45 |
Apparition sequence/ Statue of Virgin | in June 1989, he says something incredible happened. The Virgin Mary appeared at the foot of a tiny Crucifix in his hotel room. PEADAR CLARKE: Our Lady just smiled, kept on smiling at me. I remember | 05:45 |
Peadar | I was smiling back and at the same time that I was smiling, there was tears rolling down my face, but it was when my hands were out that I realised my hands are out and they’re not shaking and I realised I’m standing. | 06:01 |
Photo. Peadar in wheelchair | No one was helping me to stand. HUTCHEON: Do you believe that a miracle occurred? | 06:16 |
Peadar | PEADAR CLARKE: Yes. HUTCHEON: Undoubtedly. PEADAR CLARKE: Absolutely, I’ve no doubt whatsoever. Til the day I die, on my death bed I’ll be saying the exact same thing. | 06:23 |
Pilgrims in wheelchairs | <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> | 06:35 |
<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> | HUTCHEON: Four years ago a wheelchair bound woman from the north of France came here on her sixth pilgrimage. | 06:39 |
Hutcheon with Nadine looking at photos | Nadine is a devout Catholic who doesn’t want her last name used. Over time, the muscles in her legs and back rapidly lost strength so that by her late 40’s, she could barely walk. | 06:47 |
Nadine leaves house with dog | This is the first time she’s revealed to any media her life changing experience. She says she was cured during prayers just days after the pilgrimage. | 07:06 |
Nadine | NADINE: It was a very calm moment. I felt very calm inside. And I felt nothing unusual – just an internal peace, a great calm and happiness. | 07:24 |
Pilgrims at cave | Music | 07:39 |
<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> | HUTCHEON: Nadine and Peadar Clarke are just two of thousands of devotees convinced they’ve been cured through their connection to Lourdes. | 07:46 |
Dr Theillier with files | DR PATRICK THEILLIER: These files are very old and fragile, so I should put them down. HUTCHEON: Nadine’s case is under investigation by the Lourdes Medical Bureau, headed by Dr Patrick Theillier. The Bureau has more than seven thousand claims in its archives. These particular records are from 1908. | 07:56 |
Dr Theillier reads to Hutcheon from file | DR PATRICK THEILLIER: [reading from book] So all these people were cured. In 4 days there were 44 declarations. HUTCHEON: That’s amazing. DR PATRICK THEILLIER: It’s really changed. HUTCHEON: Dr Theillier says claims of miracle cures | 08:19 |
<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> | were far more prevalent a hundred years ago than they are today. | 08:35 |
Dr Theillier | DR PATRICK THEILLIER: The people who get cured don’t tend to declare themselves. They’re afraid of being illuminated by God. So that’s a religious reason I suppose – or because they don’t want any additional medical examinations. | 08:42 |
Religious statuary/Photos of nuns | Music | 09:02 |
<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> | HUTCHEON: Sixty-seven miracles, most of them involving nuns, have been validated by the Catholic Church. One of the most recent was Jean Pierre Bely | 09:20 |
Photo. Bely | who was declared cured of Multiple Sclerosis after visiting Lourdes in 1987. He died last year. | 09:30 |
Clergy with pilgrims | The Church insists on a rigorous investigation of miraculous cures, which must be both immediate and permanent. Even among Catholics, the process has its critics. | 09:42 |
Stanford | PETER STANFORD: I’m a sceptic about physical miracle cures. I don’t think God is a conjuring artist and I think there’s always been within Catholicism, within religion, this kind of, | 09:57 |
Super: Peter Stanford | this other tendency to try and find proof and it’s partly to do with the kind of scientific enlightenment and the idea we can’t believe anything unless we can prove it, so this idea has taken hold and the Church has bought into it now. | 10:06 |
Hutcheon with Dr Theillier | HUTCHEON: Dr Theillier is a devout Catholic and a respected physician. Every day he opens letters from around the world, many detailing miracles both big and small. | 10:19 |
<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> | DR PATRICK THEILLIER [reading]: I’m writing to you to confirm that I was a witness to the miraculous cure of a young lady. HUTCHEON: He denies Lourdes encourages pilgrims to hope for a miraculous cure. | 10:36 |
Dr Theillier. Super: | DR PATRICK THEILLIER: We’ve never been a miracle factory in any way. We’ve never looked for miracles. They’ve just come to us, and we’ve welcomed them. We’ve done everything to limit them and take into consideration only those, which were sure and certain. But we didn’t turn it into an industry. | 10:50 |
Family photo. Peadar | HUTCHEON: After his cure he and his wife had two children and life was good. | 11:14 |
Hutcheon with Peadar at home | But now he’s developed chronic arthritis and can barely walk. PEADAR CLARKE: It’s so severe it’s hard to take, but | 11:22 |
Peadar. Super: | at the same time you just say uh-uh you’re all the time reminded of the way you were, and the way I was, I was an excuse of a human being and now I have a life. | 11:36 |
Hutcheon and Peadar at home grotto in garden | HUTCHEON: Peadar Clarke eventually pulled out of the validation process because he disliked the celebrity status that went with it. PEADAR CLARKE: As the years went on, | 11:51 |
Peadar | it was becoming more -- more of the -- how could I say, circus nearly, and I didn’t want it, I just didn’t want it. | 12:05 |
<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> | HUTCHEON: So some people actually treated you as if you could perhaps fast track them to a miracle? | 12:18 |
<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> | PEADAR CLARKE: Absolutely. Like I would find like -- and I don’t mean it in badness towards anyone -- but they would be touching you and you know and have to rub off you and you know, it wasn’t me. I felt that, say regarding myself, people were coming with me to be with the miracle man. | 12:24 |
<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> | HUTCHEON: You were called the miracle man? | 12:55 |
<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> | PEADAR CLARKE: Yeah you know and I didn’t like that. I, I like being just being part, being part of a group, just being an ordinary Joe soul hidden in the corner. Leave me there, let me do my own thing. | 12:56 |
Pilgrims at cave | 13:12 | |
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Credits: | Reporter: Jane Hutcheon Camera: Sam Ingram Editor: Mark Douglas | 13:45 |