The Song of Bernadette
by Franz Werfel
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Book Summary Information
Author: Franz WerfelBrand: Ignatius Press
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2006-10-01
ISBN: 1586171712
Number of pages: 600
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Book Reviews of The Song of Bernadette
Book Review: Promise Kept "to Sing the Song of Bernadette"
Summary: 5 Stars
One day in the mid-nineteenth century, Bernadette Soubirous, a girl from a destitute miller's family in Lourdes near the French Pyrenees, saw a beautiful woman in a grungy grotto. Not a ghostly apparition, mind you, but an apparently flesh-and-blood person. Problem was, no one else saw her. The religiously inclined concluded that Bernadette's lady was the Virgin Mary, though the peasant girl herself made no such claims. The modernists of the community and soon of the nation suspected that the girl was either lying or hallucinating. The authorities, fearing crowds and the possibility of insurrection, sought to suppress the event. Bernadette, though ignorant and barely literate, upheld her integrity and stood her ground on the existence of the lady as pressure from family, friends, and Church and State leaders mounted.
Church and State, normally at odds with each other in post-Revolutionary, anti-clerical France, became uncomfortable allies in attempting to rid France of this embarrassing situation, but to no avail: Bernadette would not retract her claim. Bernadette, always staying above the fray, continued to see her lady, who eventually revealed herself to be "The Immaculate Conception." (The doctrine of the Virgin Mary's having been born free of Original Sin had been proclaimed by the Pope four years before, but the people around Bernadette maintained that she knew nothing of that.) After miracles started occurring at a spring at the grotto--Bernadette, following the lady's direction, had uncovered the spring--Church and State found it increasingly difficult to suggest that Bernadette was a pretender or an outright fraud.
This novelized treatment of the famous story of the woman who would be canonized Saint Marie-Bernarde Soubirous has a story behind it about as interesting as its subject. It was penned by Franz Werfel, a Jew, to keep a promise. Werfel, trying to flee German-occupied France during World War II, had sought refuge in Lourdes while seeking a way out of the country. The people of Lourdes had been very accommodating and generous, and while he sojourned with them, he learned the story of Bernadette Soubirous. He promised that one day, if he and his wife escaped safely, he would "sing the song of Bernadette." It's interesting to note that, though one might think in reading the book that it was written by a Catholic, Werfel remained a Jew his whole life. (THE SONG OF BERNADETTE was later turned into a movie starring Jennifer Jones in her pre-sultry starlet days; Jones won an Academy Award for her performance.)
What I found remarkable is that, albeit not entirely free of cinematic-like dramatic devices, the novel is as sober-minded as it is. One can read this account and still think that everything Bernadette experienced stemmed from her imagination, and that the miracles associated with Lourdes may have been borne of the power of suggestion (though some of the miracles would be difficult to explain that way). Indeed, as the novel points out (and Werfel hewed closely to the facts of the matter, taking dramatic license in the interactions and discussions between people), the Catholic Church had been very reluctant to accept both Bernadette's claims and the miracles. Only after thorough testing of Bernadette, witnesses, and medical experts did it finally embrace the entire matter. The mayor of Lourdes had rather early on attempted to exploit the spring's "miraculous" mineral waters by trying to recreate lowly Lourdes as a glitzy spa--unfortunately, tests on the spring waters found nothing remarkable about them. Still, the mayor would triumph as Lourdes became a Catholic Mecca.
THE SONG OF BERNADETTE is a lengthy novel, but it is mostly a brisk read. It will appeal to Catholics, of course, but also to anyone interested reading about one of modernity's first confrontations with a mass religious phenomenon. (Readers who might like a similar story set in contemporary times are urged to pick up David Guterson's flawed but nonetheless interesting OUR LADY OF THE FOREST.)
Summary of The Song of Bernadette
This is the famous and highly acclaimed classic work that tells the true story surrounding the miraculous visions of St. Bernadette Soubirous at Lourdes, France in 1858. Werfel, a highly respected literary writer who was an outspoken anti-Nazi from Vienna, became a Jewish refugee who barely escaped death from the Nazis in 1940, and wrote this moving story to fulfill a promise he made to God. Thus the story of how this book about a miracle came to be written is in itself something of a miracle.As he and his wife were hiding out in the little village of Loudres while trying to escape to freedom in the USA during WWII, Werfel felt the Nazi noose tightening around them and realizing that they might well be caught and executed, he made a promise to God to write about the "song of Bernadette" that he had been deeply inspired by during their clandestine stay Lourdes.
An amazing aspect of this powerful portrayal of a Catholic saint and an essentially Catholic story is that Werfel was a rather secular Jew, and yet he was so deeply impressed by both Bernadette and the happenings at Lourdes, that his writing has a profound sense of Catholicism's sacramental imagination about the world.
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