OUR LADY OF LOURDES.

New Zealand Tablet, 14 November 1918, Page 13

OUR LADY OF LOURDES.

Speaking recently in Westminster Cathedral, London, on “Our Lady of Lourdes,” Hilaire Belloc developed a thesis to the effect that Lourdes was the influence that broke up the old materialism of the mid-nineteenth century. In the course of his adumbration Mr. Belloc gave an illuminating instance of the way in which things Catholic can be boycotted in a Protestant country. y The very last edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica contained this extremely short account of the phenomena of Lourdes : That a peasant girl had thought Our Lady to have appeared in a grotto there, and that there were votive offerings. Not a single word about the miracles. So that in a work which arrogates to itself to be considered one of the chief books of reference of the day the tremendous phenomenon which changed the mind of Europe with regard to spiritual affairs—which provoked one of the greatest quarrels of the timesis dismissed without a word. “That,” said Mr. Belloc, “is an example of the sea of anti-Catholicism in which you live and against which you have to react.” Volumes could say no more.