Lourdes Water

The most striking thing about Lourdes water is what the sanctuary says about it, which is almost nothing. It has not been blessed. No rite has been performed over it. The sanctuary states plainly that the water has no property in itself, gives it away, and prohibits its sale, so the taps along the grotto wall run continuously and the containers are free. In a town whose economy is built on several million pilgrims a year, and where every shop sells candles, statues and rosaries, the one thing that cannot be sold is the water. That restraint is the Church's answer to a charge it has faced since 1858, that it is trading in the hope of desperate people.

What the water is, institutionally, is a point of contact. The spring emerged during the series of apparitions reported by Bernadette Soubirous, a miller's daughter of fourteen, at the grotto of Massabielle in 1858. She was told, she said, to drink and wash there. The bishop of Tarbes approved the apparitions in 1862 after an inquiry. Everything else, the basilicas, the processions, the baths, the hospitals and the enormous organised pilgrimages of the sick, was built around that spot afterwards. The water is what the site offers, and it is offered on terms designed to make it impossible to describe as a purchase.

Lourdes attracts the seriously ill, and claims of cure followed immediately. The response was unusual: rather than defend the claims, the sanctuary built a procedure to test them. A medical bureau was established at Lourdes in the nineteenth century, open to any doctor visiting, to document claimed cures and to look for a medical explanation. An international medical committee was later added above it. A claim must be documented before and after, must concern a serious and objectively verifiable condition, and must be unexplained by treatment or by known natural remission. Even then the bureau does not declare anything a miracle. It refers the file to the bishop of the claimant's own diocese, who decides.

Out of many thousands of claims across more than a century and a half, the number formally declared has been very small, and the rate has fallen as diagnostic medicine has improved, which is what one would expect of a filter that eliminates cases with a medical explanation. Critics read the whole exercise as an institution grading its own homework; the counter-argument is that the filter throws out almost everything and is designed to. What is not in dispute is the Church's formal position, which attributes nothing to the water. Popular practice attributes a great deal to it, and the gap between the two is where this object actually lives.