Church of Notre Dame, West 114th Street
By Joris-Karl Huysmans
(Plon, Paris 1908)
It is hard to find a pre-World War II church in Manhattan that does not commemorate in some way the apparition at Lourdes. Sometimes it is a window. More often it is a depiction of the Lourdes grotto itself ranging from small statue groups of Bernadette and the Virgin to life-size recreations. These images give an indication of the impact of Lourdes on Catholic popular piety of that era. And the role of Lourdes in New York was not confined to pictures and statues. In the 1890’s the Redemptorist church of Most Holy Redeemer began dispensing actual Lourdes water – miracles were not slow to follow. Finally, in 1914 New York acquired its own duplicate shrine of Lourdes at the church of Notre Dame on West 114th Street. It functions as an authentic, if little known, “Lourdes in Manhattan” to this very day.
In the early 1900’s Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907) undertook to explore personally the realm of Lourdes. Although the author was by then a Catholic, this book is not at all a conventional exercise in piety. For the spirituality of Lourdes was deeply contrary to the author’s nature. He was a lover of the solitary mystic experience, of the Gothic cathedrals and of the traditional chant of the church. The raucous popular devotion he would encounter at Lourdes was for him a deep challenge.
He encountered armies of pilgrims arriving every day by train from every region of France and beyond. The incessant music – brass bands and popular pilgrimage hymns – was ear-splitting. (Participants in today’s Chartres pilgrimage will recall many hymns that Huysmans specifically mentions: “Laudate Mariam,” “Nous voulons Dieu” etc.). Some of these groups – such as the Bretons – still wore their national costumes. And it is fun to read how Huysmans makes his way into the crowded shrine behind a phalanx of Spanish women wearing mantillas and waving their fans. Many of these pilgrims, of course, were seeking a cure. The author describes their maladies – often cancers or advanced tuberculosis – in almost unendurable detail. The depiction of the stench and the filth, the sweat and the blood can be overpowering.
St. John Nepomocene Church, East 66th Street.
Huysmans calls Lourdes the “boiler room” of piety. Everyone seemed to succumb after a while to kind of frenzy. Reports of fresh miracles circulated daily – regardless of whether the official Lourdes bureau accepted them or not. The pilgrim felt cut off from the rest of the world – only Lourdes existed now. Again, it is only on the Chartres pilgrimage that I have felt his same exclusive focus on the immediate, this forgetfulness of the world otherwise so insistent in its demands.
A highlight of this book is the memorable description of the Grotto at night before the arrival of the pilgrimage crowds. It is a veritable sea of light from the thousands of candles. Huysmans explores the symbolism of the candle in these startling terms:
“The candle is composed of three parts; the wax that is the flesh so white of Jesus; the wick that is inserted in that wax which is His most pure Soul hidden under the envelope of his body and the fire which is the emblem of His divinity.”
Elsewhere Huysmans contrasts the ‘living” light of the candle to ‘dead” electric light. And he condemns those who try to deceive God by offering candles not made of beeswax but of poisonous industrial products. In a truly bizarre passage he compares the caretaker of the candles to a gardener tending a bed of different kinds of flowers – which weep waxen tears. By skillfully moving about the candles as they expire, the caretaker enables the various sizes and kinds of candles to mutually support each other – it is an image of the communion of Saints. In this remarkable chapter Huysmans unites precision of observation, esoteric knowledge and the hallucinatory style of his earlier “decadent” novels.
St. Vincent de Paul Church, West 23rd Street.
At times the shock of what he experiences compels Huysmans to abandon the role of the erudite observer and to mingle his prayers with those of the poor and sick. As a procession with the Monstrance circulates among the most severely afflicted pilgrim, the author raises his voice to heaven – Please Lord, help these ones now who have come so far and endured so much! And Huysmans is heartbroken when a young grievously afflicted pilgrim who had appeared cured suffers relapse. How can such a cruel deception happen? Why are so few helped? Yet he already knows the answer to the question, albeit one hard for us to accept. By their prayers and suffering these sick pilgrims are “completing the sufferings of Christ” and in a mysterious way obtaining graces for others or for themselves.
St. Elizabeth of Hungary Church, East 83rd Street
Why review this book now? To recall a monument to a now-vanished world of European popular piety? To inform ourselves about Lourdes from what is even today a treasure trove of the most amazing information about all aspects of the shrine, its history and its operation? Yes – but if we look closely we will see that this work, describing an era situated between the medieval and the modern, also says much about developments we have all lived through in the last half-century.
First, Huysmans a great champion of returning to proper liturgical practice and of plainsong, found little to praise at Lourdes. The liturgical life he experienced at Lourdes was a disaster. The normal form of liturgy was a low mass accompanied by totally unconnected hymns. The hours and office were not sung. Only once did he experience a solemn mass with the appropriate chant – at least for the first half of that service. Huysmans in this book is arguing for a true liturgical reform of a kind that only in our day certain Traditional parishes have partially realized.
Second, Huysmans perceived a distinction in messsage between Lourdes and the immediately preceding apparitions in the Rue du Bac and La Salette. At Lourdes the emphasis is no longer on penance and a warning of disasters to come. Instead, there is the free disbursement of graces, a mission of mercy and clemency. It is obviously a more popular message. Do we not see parallels here with the “non-judgmental” spirituality of the Vatican II Church? (After the author’s death, of course, our Lady at Fatima reiterated the note of warning and the call to repentance of the earlier apparitions.)
But third, and most important, is Huysmans’ meditation on beauty in ecclesiastical art set forth in the extraordinary chapter VI. For Huysmans saw himself totally surrounded by ugliness at Lourdes: the architecture of the churches, the paintings, the music, the attire of most of the pilgrims etc. He had no doubt that this was of satanic origin. For Satan’s chosen weapon against the graces of Lourdes from the very beginning was ugliness. Huysmans explains that art is special gift that may be employed for good or for ill but which always retains its divine character. It is the reproduction of Beauty unique and multiform like the Divinity itself – even though it can only be a feeble mirror of the Infinite Beauty. The beautiful thus has a necessary relation with God (Lamennais). To Huysmans, the contrary is necessarily true -the ugly has a necessary relation with the demon. To depict our Lord in an ugly work art is thus in a sense of work of black magic – transforming divine images into infernal ones. Those are strong words coming from an author who had had much more experience than most men in the occult arts. The ugliness at Lourdes also proceeded from the intrusion of modernity into the Church – this in 1908! The problem of the Church was not that She was behind the times but that She was all too obviously a captive of the taste of the age.
Immaculate Conception Church, East 14th Street.
I cannot imagine the author’s reaction to the contemporary music and art of the Catholic Church. We get a hint of what he would likely think in his condemnation of the intrusion of popular melodies into the liturgy and his savage denunciation of the Rosary basilica at Lourdes because its architecture could just as easly serve as a machine shop or shed for locomotives. A structure, by the way, already bathed in electric light (like St. Patrick’s cathedral in New York today).
St. Cecilia Church, East 105th St.
Although he does not mention it in the text, Huysmans was dying of a very painful form of cancer when he wrote this book, which appeared the year before he died. He had left Lourdes deeply impressed by the unbroken piety of the humbler classes and the charity practiced by the staff of the shrine, the medical personal and certain of the sisters. And once we are forced once again – this time by the author – to compare the pilgrimages to Chartres and Lourdes. For Huysmans states that in 1200 one would have encountered at Chartres the same crowds, the same faith and charity as at Lourdes. Only the architecture, the liturgy and the costumes of the people were of an entirely different order. Now on the pilgrimage to Chartres today the music sung on the march may not be according to the late M. Huysmans’ taste. But he is undoubtedly pleased to see that on every day the solemn mass is celebrated with all its propers sung!
St. Stephen’s Church, East 28th Street.
You can find HERE the original text (this invaluable site has many other texts of Huysmans). An English translation appeared in the 1920’s – it would be well for a publishing house to make this work available to the English-speaking readers again.
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