Valentine Greatraks, the “Stroker.”

 

If the reader has actually witnessed a modern faith-healer in action with crowds of worshipers around and about, that scenario will be familiar. Four major observations made by that witness more than three centuries ago apply to today’s situation: (1) The healer made his audience wait for him, thus enhancing his importance and increasing anticipation. (2) Skeptics were unable, because of the choreography of the event, to question the healer before the show. (3) Illnesses were attributed to evil spirits (demons, devils) rather than to living habits, infections, or other real causes. (4) The sick imagined that they were cured, when actually they were not. London again became a center for faith-healing in the 1870s. It was very popular and widely practiced then, and the idea continues to attract huge numbers of followers in England. Structures and shrines, such as the tombs of Saint Francis of Assisi and others, are said to have caused miracle cures for those who visited them. The tomb of Catherine of Siena, a literate woman who was never granted her most ardent desire, “the red rose of martyrdom,” has been credited with bringing about countless healings, though no such cures were attributed to her in her lifetime.

St. Catherine of Siena, an early healing saint.

 

The Most Famous Christian Shrine

It is the town of Lourdes, France, that has attained the strongest international reputation for miracles of healing. This acclaim is the result of a commercial venture that began with a story about Bernadette Soubirous, an ignorant peasant girl who said she had a visitation there from “the lady” in 1858. A shrine was established in 1876 to which some five million visitors a year now flock, occupying 400 hotels built for them. The public relations people who sell Lourdes as a business claim that there are about 30,000 healings a year, but church authorities deny that figure, cautioning that only about 100 claims have been properly documented since the founding of the shrine, and the church has as of this date accepted only 64 as miracles, from the millions of cures claimed over the years. Whether these were simply remissions of various kinds, or perhaps recoveries brought about by orthodox medical attention, we cannot know. In several cases, we have no evidence that the ailments were even real. In the absence of proof that the attendance of the afflicted at the shrine was the one element responsible for the termination of the ailment, common sense, as well as the simple principle of parsimony, would require us to doubt the miraculous nature of these events. Bathing in the mineral springs of Lourdes and drinking of the spring water have been confused with the healing stories. The church has never made any claim that the spring water from the Lourdes grotto is curative in any way, yet every year the souvenir shops sell thousands of gallons to the faithful in tiny vials, as amulets. Those who attend Lourdes in person have consumed millions of gallons more. It is amazing that more worshipers have not contracted diseases from that practice. Europeans are prone to accept the medicinal value of almost any natural spring water-especially if it smells bad. They cannot resist drinking from and washing in the Lourdes spring. Regarding the claims of healings at Lourdes, the CBS-TV program “60 Minutes” said in 1986 of the famous shrine:There are stories of the crippled who suddenly could walk, the blind who suddenly could see, the incurable cancers that were cured. But most of these remain undocumented stories, part of the mythology that gives other pilgrims hope.

“60 Minutes” was appalled by the commercial aspects of the operation. Commenting on the endless theatrical and carefully choreographed candle-lit processions and the heartless exploitation of the faithful by the souvenir salesmen, the TV program told viewers:The sanctuary of Lourdes, with its many basilicas and shrines, is like a multicomplex theater that gives a dozen religious performances a day, and the church stage-manages them all with care. This is the Lourdes that they would like you to see, but just outside the gates of the sanctuary, a different Lourdes was unhappy at being seen at all, at least on camera.

The CBS cameramen were blocked and pushed by the entrepreneurs and prevented from filming the garish displays of holy water, religious statues, gimcracks, and cheaply printed booklets that are peddled at this holy site. The merchants apparently were not willing to allow the outside world to see them as they actually were; that might destroy the Hollywood image they so eagerly trade on. But concealed cameras managed to show television viewers that the whole Lourdes operation is an exercise in bad taste and opportunism. In the words of the “60 Minutes” script, Lourdes is “curios rather than cures.”