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Consuming Visions: Mass Culture and the Lourdes Shrine

2005; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 5; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/scs.2006.0023

1535-3117

Vincent Jude Miller,

Vietnamese History and Culture Studies

Reviewed by: Consuming Visions: Mass Culture and the Lourdes Shrine Vincent J. Miller (bio) Consuming Visions: Mass Culture and the Lourdes Shrine. By Suzanne K. Kaufman. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005. 245 pp. $34.95 Spirituality is a field where the tensions between different academic views of popular religious belief and practice are particularly acute. On the one hand, popular religion is celebrated for its concreteness and authenticity. On this view it supplements the intellectual abstractions of theology with spiritual discourses more directly tied to religious experiences and practices. On the other hand, these laudatory discourses are frequently those of elites as well. These are often critical of the state of the spiritual life among everyday believers. If everyday life is valued as a locus of the spiritual life, we are most comfortable with life in ages past, or in the personal details of contemporary existence. The commercial glare of consumer culture is seldom seen as a locus of encounter with the divine. The Shrine at Lourdes is an interesting case in this regard. Bernadette Soubirous's first encounter with an apparition of the Virgin Mary in 1858 produced a thoroughly modern pilgrimage site that replicated in religious form contemporaneously emerging resort towns with uncanny precision. Commerce in Lourdes water, statuary, and postcards were central practices of the pilgrimage. The pilgrimage depended on train travel. Its miracles were debated in the modern press. Most modern of all perhaps, it provoked what Eric Hobsbawm has described as the distinctly modern anxiety to distinguish authentic tradition from its contemporary debasement. Suzanne Kaufman argues for an understanding of Lourdes as a thoroughly modern religious phenomenon. As such, it challenges the desire to distinguish the authentically religious from its "modern debasement." Following Colleen McDannell, she notes the continuing legacy of Protestant suspicion of visual piety and Catholic concern about the religion of the uneducated masses. Ultimately, she argues that Lourdes even challenges Durkheim's distinction between sacred and profane insofar as it has been replicated in historians' evaluations of modern religious movements' relationship to consumerism and the commercial sphere. "At Lourdes, sacred and profane—religious practice and secular world—never stood in opposition but, rather, commingled in a process of constant cross-fertilization" (14). This cross-fertilization took place amidst the struggles among clergy, the laity, and anticlerical republicans in the Third Republic. Kaufman supplements and challenges earlier accounts of Lourdes that cast it as a romantic reaction against modern urban French society. Certainly the Fathers of the Assumption desired to use Lourdes as a rallying point for Catholicism as part of a reactionary program that included hopes for the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy. The contest between Catholicism and secular France that developed around the shrine, however, was fought on modern territory using modern technology and media. The devotion depended upon railways and was spread through the mass media. The battles concerning the legitimacy of its miraculous cures were carried out using the claims of emerging medical science and the tools of publicity in the mass press. Pilgrims' imaginations were formed through newly affordable mass print media. Postcards portrayed Bernadette, the Grotto, the town, processions of pilgrims, and images of famous miraculéswho had been cured at the shrine. Kaufman gives particular attention to the role guidebooks played in creating [End Page 221] Lourdes as a modern form of pilgrimage. These were close parallels to secular tourist guidebooks. They provided images of the highpoints of the journey, maps of key sites, and advice to the savvy pilgrim on how to make the most of the experience on a limited budget. Lourdes guidebooks were not however, complete parallels to their secular equivalents. Key to Kaufman's thesis is the fact that they did not replicate the secular emphasis on the rural as an escape from the modern. Indeed, these guides explicitly emphasized the modern character of the site. Major renovations to the town were detailed and applauded. Technological developments such as electric lights and a funicular railway were featured in guidebooks. The commercial districts appear in both guidebooks and in picture postcards. If Lourdes was a symbol of premodern spiritual simplicity, pilgrims seemed comfortably enough engaging this through modern technology and commerce. Kaufman argues...