Confounding the World: Lourdes and St. Caedmon

From France to England, from Portugal to Israel, it is always true that God and His Mother reveal the power of the divine to those weak and foolish in the eyes of the world (1 Cor. 1:27), but rich and strong in love for God.

The stories of today’s two saints illustrate that truth. To one of the poorest and least intellectual girls in the humble town of Lourdes did Jesus’s Mother appear, to the girl who was sickly and incapable of learning her lessons. Yet Bernadette recognized what many an acclaimed scholar has spent his life obfuscating or ignoring: the truth. Meanwhile, centuries before Bernadette was born, an untutored cowherd communed so closely with God that he was able to produce the most marvelous spiritual poetry, while other monks with ten times his learning strayed onto the path of damnation.

Our Lady of Lourdes is the title of a series of apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary to St. Bernadette Soubiroux, a poor and sickly girl, in 1858 near the French town of Lourdes. “During the 9th appearance, on 25 February, the Lady told Bernadette to drink from a spring that suddenly appeared in the grotto where the apparitions occurred.

Share

“During the 12th appearance, on 1 March, a visitor washed her arm in water from the spring, and some nerve damage in it was immediately cured.” Since then many miracles have occurred there. Mary asked for a chapel at the grotto and identified herself as the Immaculate Conception. Bernadette was harassed by skeptics, and the mayor of Lourdes tried to barricade the grotto, but Our Lady and the floods of pilgrims won out, and Lourdes is now one of the major Catholic pilgrimage sites.

Subscribe now

St. Caedmon was an illiterate cowherd who tended animals at the Whitby monastery in 7th century England. He received a vision ordering him to glorify God through hymns, miraculously giving him the poetic skills so that he could do so. “As he was illiterate, the brothers would read the Bible to Caedmon, and he would repeat it back to them as poetry. With the encouragement of Saint Hilda, Whitby’s abbess, he became a Columban lay brother.” He is the first vernacular English poet and a miracle-worker, whose story was told by Venerable Bede. Below is a section of Caedmon’s hymn in modern English:

Now we should praise
the heaven-kingdom’s guardian,
the measurer’s might
and his mind-conception,
work of the glorious father,
as he each wonder,
eternal Lord,
instilled at the origin.

He first created
for men’s sons
heaven as a roof,
holy creator;
then, middle-earth,
mankind’s guardian,
eternal Lord,
afterward made
the earth for men,
father almighty.

Both Bernadette and Caedmon remind us of the stark truth of what Jesus said (Mk.8:36): “what shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and suffer the loss of his soul?”

Parts of this article were adapted from one published last year.