The surprise felt by many at Pope Leo’s visit and Franz Werfel’s discovery of Lourdes

In June 1940, the mood in Paris in the face of the menacing occupier was not one of surprise, but of terror. This stood in stark contrast to the unexpected amazement with which even the most disillusioned and disinterested Parisians observed the warmth shown by the vast numbers of French people who had flocked to Pope Leo. In June 1940, Franz Werfel and his wife Alma Schindler were in Paris among the terrified; they were among the two million who attempted to flee the Nazi occupation; they tried to reach Portugal. Werfel was a well-known Bohemian writer, a friend of Max Brod and Franz Kafka, a Jew from a secular family. His wife, the widow of Gustav Mahler, was, on the other hand, Viennese and from a Catholic family. They found themselves trapped on the road through the Pyrenees, like the multitudes described by Irène Némirovsky in Suite Française. “In Pau, a local family told us that Lourdes was the only place where some of Fortune’s favourites might still be able to find accommodation.” 

The circumstances surrounding Werfel and his wife’s escape from occupied Paris bear no resemblance to those of the thousands of French agnostics – or even those of the old republican anti-clericalist persuasion – who witnessed Pope Prevost’s visit. One factor, however, unites them: it is the surprise, perhaps even the sense of wonder, at an unexpected event. They were simply struck by the sight of the crowds who welcomed Leo, prayed with him, and the young people who sang in Latin with him. Franz Werfel experienced the same sense of amazement. A secular Jew with humanitarian and pacifist convictions, he had neither knowledge of nor interest in the history he was about to encounter. “Since the famous city was just thirty kilometres away, we were advised to give it a go and knock on its gates.” They let us in.

“In this way, Providence led me to Lourdes, whose marvellous history I had not previously had even the faintest notion of.” He was amazed by that place, tucked away beneath the mountains, full of convents and hostels for the sick. They remained in hiding for seven weeks. During those days, Werfel began to learn about the history of the apparitions; he discovered the Grotto of Massabielle and the life of Bernadette Soubirous. He was deeply moved. He was even more struck by the fact that such an extraordinary story was almost unknown to much of the world. So he made a vow: if they ever managed to flee to America, ‘before any other work, I would sing Bernadette’s song as best I could’. And so it was that in 1941, in New York, he wrote "The Song of Bernadette". It became a great success; in 1943, it was adapted into a film, Henry King’s hagiographic melodrama, which was so different from Werfel’s clear, sympathetic yet never doctrinal narrative.

In the introduction to the first edition, in which he recounts the dramatic discovery of Lourdes, he writes: “The sceptical reader, faced with the events narrated here, may ask with even greater justification than in the case of historical epics: ‘What is true? What is invented?’. I reply: all the remarkable events that make up the content of this book actually took place. They began no more than eighty years ago and therefore unfold in the full light of history; their truth is attested to, in faithful testimony, by friends, enemies and impartial observers. My account does not in the slightest alter this truth’.” Werfel did not convert. He merely wished to bear witness to a surprise, which was also the discovery of another faith and another France – such as the rural France of the Pyrenees in the mid-nineteenth century, not too dissimilar to the one that welcomed him on the banks of the Gave. “I dared to sing Bernadette’s song, I who am not a Catholic but a Jew.” Like many commentators—those not primarily concerned with defending the status quo—who have felt the backlash of a strange discovery. (Bernadette’s song is published by Gallucci).