There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
—Hamlet, Act 1, Scene V
Nineteenth-century France turned out splendid atheists. There was nothing half-baked about a nineteenth-century French atheist. When he left the Catholic faith, he didn’t shilly-shally around with Protestantism or the religious methadone treatment called Unitarianism. He went straight for hard-boiled materialism that declared the supernatural to be bunk.
One such man was Alexis Carrel, a nineteenth-century doctor who won the Nobel prize in Medicine in 1912. Raised a Catholic, Carrel had, by 1900, rejected all supernatural belief and become a committed atheistic materialist. But he also believed in investigating facts rather than simply imposing ideology on things. So in 1902, he accompanied a doctor friend to the shrine at Lourdes where, it was said, the Blessed Virgin had appeared to a girl named Bernadette Soubirous in 1858. There were many stories of miraculous cures at the shrine as sick people washed in or drank from a spring that had been dug there by Bernadette. Profoundly skeptical, Carrel wanted to see for himself. So he boarded a train for Lourdes—and met Marie Bailly. Fr. Stanley Jaki tells the story:
Marie Bailly was born in 1878. Both her father . . . and her mother died of tuberculosis. Of her five siblings only one was free of that disease. She was twenty when she first showed symptoms of pulmonary tuberculosis. A year later she was diagnosed with tuberculous meningitis, from which she suddenly recovered when she used Lourdes water. In two more years, in 1901, she came down with tubercular peritonitis. Soon she could not retain food.
