Finally, at long last, we were done with tourism and at the first major pilgrimage destination on our journey. I had been wondering the whole trip: what will it be like? This is the site of a carefully investigated and approved apparition. People regularly come here to be healed, from all around the world, and apparently it works ‘cause people still keep coming.
It was pretty darn touristy (especially after seeing Laghet).
It wasn’t a disappointing visit, there were just more materialistic trappings than I had imagined. If you take three buildings at random from a street in Lourdes, I can guarantee that one is a gift shop and another is a hotel. I guess it makes sense, though; the easiest way to make a living in that town is to serve the 5 million pilgrims that come every year. Add to that the fact that 2008 marked the 150 year anniversary of the apparition, and you’ve got even more pilgrims flooding the streets.
When we got there, the streets were virtually empty, though.
It was pretty early in the morning, AND apparently March is part of the “off-season.” Half the hotels were closed and a lot of the shops were renovating, repainting, or just boarded up. Down by the shrine, the streets looked even more deserted. To accommodate all the visitors and processions they have over the summer, the sidewalks widen down by the shrine, until they’re twice as wide as the street. Then the cars stop, and it gets even bigger. There we were, walking across giant sidewalks, luggage in tow, with no one in sight and empty gift shops lining the street.
It was a pretty surreal experience.
One of the unique elements of Lourdes was that every gift shop is named after a saint… but for no apparent reason. The Joan of Arc store has all the same merchandise as the St. Bridget store, or the store of the Sacred Heart. My guess is they use the name to pull in pilgrims that like that particular saint, and make them buy souvenirs there instead of somewhere else.
We stayed in an “apartment hotel,” which was probably the nicest lodging we had the whole trip. The best part was: it had a kitchen! We resolved to make full use of it, which led to some other adventures (but I’ll talk about them in the next post). The plan was just to drop off our luggage and go adventuring. We decided to collapse for awhile first, though. The overnight train was more exhausting than I thought it would be.
Eventually, we did get out to the shrine, and ran into the same “empty” feeling there, too. This place was obviously built to hold a lot of people, and there were hardly any around. We explored the grounds around the shrine first, and found some ‘empty’ buildings: museums (one about the shroud of Turin, one about recent healings at the shrine, stuff like that), huge meeting halls, and a bunch of chapels. Most of the chapels were closed, and the ones that were open had the Blessed Sacrament removed, just because no one would be in there.
The first place that we found real activity was at the reconciliation building. It was three stories tall, and its sole function was to house confessionals. Probably 30 people could receive the sacrament at the same time, and it was still in use during the off-season. That struck me as amazing.
Tasha: As a contrast to this, my home church just built their first confessional. The church has been around for almost 30 years. Think about that for a bit.
Steve: As we got closer to the heart of the place, we saw more life. The church itself was huge. It had a colonnade around the courtyard, a lot like St. Peter’s (it even had statues of the saints around the top, although a lot fewer than there are at the basilica). On the ground level is a cathedral dedicated to the Rosary, and that was full of tourists. Around the inside are 15 arches, each with a domed ceiling piece and an altar; each one dedicated to a different decade of the Rosary. The wall above each altar is a particular scene from the life of Christ, surrounded by the Old Testament prophesies, symbolism, and foreshadowings that apply to it. Each one was a pile of theology, painted purely in pictures. The most interesting part was how recent it was. None of it was more than 150 years old. Huge contrast to Rome, where a church from the 13th century isn’t out of the ordinary. Most of the artwork here was finished around 1907.
Above the cathedral was the main basilica, but there was a crypt for perpetual adoration in between them. Now take a second to count: that’s three churches, stacked literally on top of each other. Then if you go around the churches, you see the mountain they are built into. In the side of that mountain is the grotto where the Blessed Mother actually appeared. That makes four churches, all in one spot, in an almost vertical line. That’s something you don’t see every day.
The crypt was beautiful. It was low, long and covered in gold. Right inside the door was a huge statue of St. Peter in a fancy chair. The toes on his leading foot were worn so far down that the brass was gone, and you could see layers of plaster underneath. So many pilgrims had gone past, and kissed his toes, or just reached up to touch them, it had worn straight through the metal.
To top off the tour, the highest basilica was much older. It was built to imitate the renaissance style, which is very restrained and austere. Compared to the churches below, it was very plain on the inside, but walking up to it, the buttresses and spires were really amazing. They were in the spirit of renovation too, and were actually replacing some of the huge stones in one of the towers with a huge crane. It had to be huge, to reach up that high.
This post has gotten pretty long, eh? I’ll cut it off here, and tell you more about our personal adventures in the next post.
