Virginie and the united hearts: “The craze for this kind of fraud testifies to an anguish”

For the first time in many years, I returned to Lourdes. The simple fervor of the pilgrims, the joyful fraternity of the exchanges, the figure of Bernadette, so humble, so discreet, and above all the charity which continues to enliven the surroundings of the cave, with this extraordinary attention to the poverty of each one, deeply touched.

A few days later, I discovered in the newspaper a paper on alleged Christic apparitions. The story obviously culminates in what looks like a cult, all that is most classic and sad – morbid interpersonality around a sixty-year-old guru, essentially speaking, under the guise of a divine revelation, of herself and her fantasies (political in this case).

Grotesque and repulsive

You don’t need to be clairvoyant to discern the vacuity of his conspiratorial discourse, mixed with a nostalgic-identity delirium, certain elements of which sometimes made me burst out laughing (“Christ would have announced since the year 2000 that after “great world events” the descendants of the Bourbons and the Capétiens will return to govern France”), sometimes cry of pity for the poor people who continue to fall into the trap (“Jesus shows me a triangle that looks like a pyramid: there are 13 black balls. They are the almighty in our world today. I get that they too have made a pact, but with darkness. »). The enthusiasm for this kind of fraud certainly testifies to an expectation, an anguish, a need to believe. But still.

A professor friend of philosophy to whom I speak about it answers me these thoughtful words: “What they refuse to consider, in my opinion, is the meaning of these apparitions. Their appearances are not only grotesque, but carry a repugnant meaning, which could not stand on its own. It only holds because it presents itself as a “secret revelation”. It needs to avail itself of this authority to establish itself as meaning. Remove this mysterious surety, and everything collapses. »

A reliable criterion of discernment

To satisfy those who are still wondering if there is a reliable criterion for discerning what the “mystics” say, one should not hesitate to question Teresa of Avila, the great transverberate of Castile. At the end of his masterpiece The Castle of the Soul, one of the most incandescent treatises on spirituality in history, the intimacy of Jesus Christ sweeps away the quest for the supernatural as an experience that is enjoyable, exclusive, or generates small-time gurus: the “true union “, the true beatitude, she assures, is to do the will of God as it is exposed in the Gospel, that is to say by loving. We are far from the fetid atmosphere of the neo-Illuminati of Morbihan. But Thérèse warns that “He who loves the most is not the one who has the most consolations”. And one of his formulas has remained justly famous: Dios tambien anda between los pucheros (“God circulates among the pots. »). Because “It is more blessed to give than to receive” (Ac 20, 35).

The union of heaven and earth is never so well seen as in charity in action here below: in a steaming and well-seasoned stew for the happiness of one’s brothers and sisters, served with a bottle of the finest wine. As in Cana, where we knew how to celebrate love. And if some are in search of very sensitive mystical adventures, they remember that Jesus commands to take a basin of water, to gird oneself with a cloth, and to squat down to wash the feet of these same brothers and sisters. Touch and smell are more surely summoned there than in all the sweats of the adolescent pseudo-mystic. And that’s what we do in Lourdes.

Virginie and the united hearts: “The craze for this kind of fraud testifies to an anguish”