She had beheld the Virgin, she was
the chosen one, the martyr. If the Virgin, said believers, had confided
three secrets to her, investing her with a triple armour as it were, it
was simply in order to sustain her in her appointed course.
The clergy had for a long time remained aloof, on its own side full of
doubt and anxiety. Abby Peyramale, the parish priest of Lourdes, was a
man of somewhat blunt ways, but full of infinite kindness, rectitude, and
energy whenever he found himself in what he thought the right path. On
the first occasion when Bernadette visited him, he received this child
who had been brought up at Bartres and had not yet been seen at
Catechism, almost as sternly as the Commissary of Police had done; in
fact, he refused to believe her story, and with some irony told her to
entreat the Lady to begin by making the briars blossom beneath her feet,
which, by the way, the Lady never did. And if the Abbe ended by taking
the child under his protection like a good pastor who defends his flock,
it was simply through the advent of persecution and the talk of
imprisoning this puny child, whose clear eyes shone so frankly, and who
clung with such modest, gentle stubbornness to her original tale.
Besides, why should he have continued denying the miracle after merely
doubting it like a prudent priest who had no desire to see religion mixed
up in any suspicious affair? Holy Writ is full of prodigies, all dogma is
based on the mysterious; and that being so, there was nothing to prevent
him, a priest, from believing that the Virgin had really entrusted
Bernadette with a pious message for him, an injunction to build a church
whither the faithful would repair in procession.
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