The Song of Bernadette (1941)

Pleasantly surprised and inspired by this book. It is a reminder of the close connection between the beautiful and the good. By his art, the author very effectively evokes Bernadette's experience of the beautiful lady who appeared to her at Lourdes, and the powerful effect it had on her. This in turn heightened my experience of the rest of the tale -- the story of the forces of family, state and even Church that questioned, doubted, and dismissed Bernadette's experience. And it certainly sweetened for me the lady's eventual triumph over all these forces!

Well worth reading!

Great read, highly recommend. Story of a yound girl who sees visions of a lady in a grotto by the river and the desruption it causes the government and church and the intellectuals. ( )

This is the famous and highly acclaimed classic work that tells the true story surrounding the miraculous visions of St. Bernadette Soubirous at Lourdes, France in 1858. Werfel, a highly respected literary writer who was an outspoken anti-Nazi from Vienna, became a Jewish refugee who barely escaped death from the Nazis in 1940, and wrote this moving story to fulfill a promise he made to God. Thus the story of how this book about a miracle came to be written is in itself something of a miracle.

As he and his wife were hiding out in the little village of Loudres while trying to escape to freedom in the USA during WWII, Werfel felt the Nazi noose tightening around them and realizing that they might well be caught and executed, he made a promise to God to write about the "song of Bernadette" that he had been deeply inspired by during their clandestine stay in Lourdes.

An amazing aspect of this powerful portrayal of a Catholic saint and an essentially Catholic story is that Werfel was a rather secular Jew, and yet he was so deeply impressed by both Bernadette and the happenings at Lourdes, that his writing has a profound sense of Catholicism's sacramental imagination about the world. ( )