Note 12 — OUR LADY OF LOURDES.
Reading edition
The reader will perhaps like to see the reports of the episcopal commission on this case:
"Hardly had Catherine Latapie-Chouat plunged her hand into the water, than she felt herself to be entirely cured; her fingers recovered their natural suppleness and elasticity, so that she could quickly open and shut them, and use them with as much ease as before the accident of October, 1856.
"From that time she has had no more trouble with them.
"The deformity of the hand of Catherine Latapie, and the impossibility of using it, being due to an anchylosis of the joints of the fingers, and to a complete lesion of the nerves or the flexor tendons, it is certain that the case was a very serious one; as also by the uselessness of all the means of cure used during eighteen months, and by the avowal of the physician, who had declared to this woman that her condition was irremediable.
"Nevertheless, in spite of the failure of such long and repeated attempts, the employment of various active healing agents, and the statement of the physician, this severe lesion disappeared immediately. Now, this sudden disappearance of the infirmity, and restoration of the fingers to their original state, is evidently beyond and above the usual course of nature, and of the laws which govern the efficacy of its agents.
"The means by which this result has been brought about leave no doubt in this respect, and establish this conclusion incontestably. In fact, it has been averred(a) that the Massabielle water is of an ordinary character, without the least curative properties. It cannot, then, by its natural action, have straightened the fingers of Catherine Latapie and restored their suppleness and agility, which had not been accomplished by the scientific remedies which were so various and used for so long a time. The wonderful result, then, which the mere touch of this water immediately produced, cannot be ascribed to it, but we must rise to a superior cause, and do homage for it to a supernatural power, of which the water of Massabielle has been, as it were, the veil and inert instrument.
"Besides, if ordinary water had been possessed of such a prodigious power, Catherine Latapie would have experienced its effect long before by the daily use which she made of it in washing herself and her children; for she had daily employed for this purpose water exactly similar to that at the grotto."—Extract from the 15th procès-verbal of the commission.
(a): This was, in fact, authentically averred, the administrative analysis to the contrary notwithstanding, at the time of the procès-verbaux of the commission.