“Construction workers found these glass bottles [pictured in the book on page 316] in 2016 while digging a utility trench at the University of Notre Dame. Archivists called to the scene saw the great number of bottles, all intact and carefully buried, and knew the likely story. They had been used in the late nineteenth century to transport holy water from Lourdes, France. Once emptied of their contents, they could not be thrown out with ordinary trash. Like any blessed item, they had to be destroyed or buried. They were buried on campus, to bear their witness more than a hundred years later.
“ ‘Lourdes water’ was something new at that time but already in great demand because of its reputed healing power. Pilgrims were making their way to the little village and reporting miracles when they bathed in the spring there or drank from its waters.
“Lourdes had – in just a few years’ time – become the third most popular Catholic pilgrim destination in the world after Rome and the Holy Land.
“In 1858, a poor fourteen-year-old girl named Bernadette Soubirous was pasturing sheep when she had a series of visits from a woman beautifully dressed in white. The woman identified herself as ‘the Immaculate Conception.’ Bernadette had no social standing or influence. Nonetheless, the woman told her to ‘go and tell the priests to build a chapel here’ and ‘have the people come here in procession.’
“It seemed an outrageous request and not only because of Bernadette’s poverty and ignorance. The pasture was used by villagers as a trash dump.
“But there was a groundswell of response from villagers and the nearby countryside, and soon pilgrims came from far away. The local bishop bought the land in 1861, three years after the visions, and official Church approval came the following year.
“Soon afterward came reports of miraculous cures experienced by people who bathed in or drank water from a spring on the land – a spring the Virgin had led Bernadette to discover.
“Soon great throngs were visiting Lourdes every year. Since 1858 almost a quarter of a billion pilgrims have made the journey to Lourdes. Probably tens of thousands have claimed to be cured. Around 7,000 have submitted their cures for rigorous investigation by the Medical Bureau of Lourdes. Of those, only sixty-nine have been certified as miracles by the Church.
“The twentieth-century novelist Flannery O’Connor, who suffered from lupus, made pilgrimage to Lourdes and experienced some relief. She was even able to put aside her crutches for a while. But she thought the real miracle of Lourdes was the charity it inspired. She said she was inclined there not to pray for herself but for the others she saw, who were much worse off than she was.
“For those who have not been able to come to the water, the water has been brought home or shipped out in bottles. Today’s containers are more likely to be plastic than glass.”
