Consuming Visions: Mass Culture and the Lourdes Shrine (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Consuming Visions: Mass Culture and the Lourdes Shrine Barbara Corrado Pope Consuming Visions: Mass Culture and the Lourdes Shrine. By Suzanne K. Kaufman. (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. 2005. Pp. viii, 255. $34.95.) Suzanne Kaufman's Consuming Visions challenges two ways of looking at the history of France and French Catholicism: The first maintains that there [End Page 430] were "two Frances," one Catholic and antimodern, the other Republican, anticlerical and in tune with the modern world of science and commerce. The second contends that French Catholicism became "feminized" in the nineteenth century, and, as a consequence, "privatized," its practices and rituals removed from the public sphere. When historians of Lourdes complicate these dichotomies, they assert that the promoters of the shrine used the instruments of modernity—the railroads, the press, and "medical proofs"—to bolster an essentially reactionary political agenda and devotional practice. Kaufman presents a brilliant, well-researched, clearly written argument that the development and practices of the Lourdes shrine are modern. Medieval pilgrimages, of course, had their share of buying, selling, and profit-mongering. But Lourdes had more: a proliferation of standardized commodities, modern transportation, and urban renewal, a panoply of developments that made Lourdes not only a tourist site, but a crucial regional economic asset. The shrine, Kaufman also contends, introduced the largely rural female influx to the modern wonders of consumption and spectacle. Lourdes was a spectacle both by design and because of the controversies it evoked. Organizers (the religious and lay orders) standardized the rituals surrounding the sick who came to the shrine hoping for a miraculous recovery: the stretchers at the train; the baths; the Procession of the Blessed Sacrament, during which the multitudes chanted for a cure; and the crowds around the Bureau of Medical Verification awaiting the declaration that a miracle had been scientifically validated. This spectacle was communicated to the rest of France, and eventually the world, through the mass press (especially the Assumptionist La Croix), best-selling books, guidebooks, and when photography became cheaper, postcards. Finally, the cured themselves became a spectacle, in Kaufman's words, "sacred celebrities," often women who used their ephemeral fame as a means to assert their moral authority. The mixture of commerce and religion, and the presence of women worshipers, spectators and shoppers made both supporters and detractors of Lourdes uneasy. Even Republicans wanted money separated from worship. Catholic moralists like Léon Bloy and aesthetes like J. K. Huysmans railed against the ugliness and commercialization. And both sides were willing to blame women, who, they said, were prone to various excesses, including hysteria. Kaufman devotes two chapters ("Scientific Sensationalism and the Miracle Cure" and "Public Wager: Publicity and the Truth of the Cure") to the most fundamental controversy: whether the cures at the shrine proved divine intervention. Catholic and secular doctors alike used the mass media to take their case to the public. Fraud and slander were among the charges and countercharges played out in a sensationalist press; so was the contention, from secularists, that all cures were "mind cures." In the end secular doctors could not reach any consensus about certain famous cases, and when anti-clerical legislators tried to close Lourdes down in 1903 they were thwarted by many in [End Page 431] their own camp whose economic interests were too entwined in keeping the shrine open. Today, Lourdes remains the most popular pilgrimage site in Europe, about which Kaufman has written (to use a modernist term) a spectacular book. Barbara Corrado Pope University of Oregon Copyright © 2007 The Catholic University of America Press