Secret of true joy, peace

By Kathryn Jean Lopez

Andrews McMeel Syndication

LOURDES, FRANCE

Brad Pitt appears to be the hero of the most recent Hollywood story, having done what many were afraid to do: stand up to Harvey Weinstein. The scandal was a far cry from the peace and dignity of Lourdes, France, where I happened to be as the tawdry details of Weinstein’s decades of sexual harassment began to emerge. Here, it’s hard to escape the natural and supernatural presence of something healing, something renewing.

Here, every night a candlelight procession seems to kindle something far beyond the digital wonders of our iPhone age. Here, the dignity of each person is on display in both modest and radiant ways. It’s restorative. It’s what we need.

Pilgrims flood in daily to this site where a young girl named Bernadette saw the mother of God.

In 2004, St. John Paul II was here and his words sound like they were delivered for us today:

“(Y)oung people who seek an answer capable of giving meaning to your lives(:) Here you can find that answer. It is a demanding one, yet it is the only answer, which is genuinely satisfying. For it contains the secret of true joy and peace.”

One can only imagine that a young Hollywood actor or actress striving for success would never tolerate behavior like Weinstein’s if he or she were thinking about such matters in a community that looked out for each other’s best interest. It’s hard not to think of the celebrities who attach themselves to political causes that claim to be about lifting up women, at the same time passively contributing to the kind of misery that Hollywood appears to be bursting at the seams with.

Role of women

John Paul, on the other hand, knew the gift that women are to the world. In Lourdes, he also said: “From this grotto I issue a special call to women. Appearing here, Mary entrusted her message to a young girl, as if to emphasize the special mission of women in our own time, tempted as it is by materialism and secularism: to be in today’s society a witness of those essential values which are seen only with the eyes of the heart. To you, women, falls the task of being sentinels of the invisible! I appeal urgently to all of you, dear brother and sisters, to do everything in your power to ensure that life, each and every life, will be respected from conception to its natural end. Life is a sacred gift, and no one can presume to be its master.”

In America today, there is some inadvertent transparency happening. In politics, in culture, on the streets. Our anger, our sins, our pain, all are on display. This plays out in all kinds of incivility, incoherence, sickness and death. We see the poisons that wreck families, cities and nations. The question is: What are we going to do about it?

John Paul had the answer here, too. “Finally, Our Lady of Lourdes has a message for everyone: Be men and women of freedom! But remember: Human freedom is a freedom wounded by sin. It is a freedom that itself needs to be set free. Christ is its liberator; he is the one who ‘for freedom has set us free.’ Defend that freedom!”

Whatever you believe about God, man and Mary, consider this message of freedom. It’s water at Lourdes that heals – there are actual medical reports confirming it. But just in a visit, you discover the miracle of a little peace and quiet. And it’s not celebrity that we’re after here, but a freeing from the chains of this world and its traps.

Kathryn Jean Lopez is senior fellow at the National Review Institute, editor-at-large of National Review Online and founding director of Catholic Voices USA.