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The apparitions of

GARABANDAL

BY
F. SANCHEZ-VENTURA Y PASCUAL

APPENDIX B

Page 199

itself. It is true that the Virgin commanded her to drink from a spring that she alone knew existed, and when the child could not find it, inspired her to scrape at the soil. It is certainly true that the water bubbled forth suddenly and the visionary drank from the spring, smearing the mud over her face. It is also true that the skeptics who witnessed the scene were disappointed at the triviality of this seemingly pointless procedure. I will even go so far as to allow what some other authors have stated, namely that Bernadette ate grass, and even that she did so at the command of the Virgin. In this way, the Virgin was able to put the visionary's spirit of obedience to the test. But the surprising part is not that she should have eaten grass or smeared her face with mud, or her embracing the ground as a sign of penitence. The true miracle lies in the fact that, when an ignorant child obeyed these orders, there issued from the hollow a trickle of water that grew and grew until, today, it produces 29,000 gallons a day. The miracle lies in the fact that this water has never ceased to flow and that it neither runs dry nor becomes brackish. And the cures . . .

   Monroy should have dwelt on this point. After all, what would he say if he wrote an article in praise of Miguel de Cervantes, and I were to launch an indignant refutation of the author's fame, claiming that praise of Cervantes was absurd, because he had scrawled all over a few pieces of paper with a rude quill, getting his fingers inky in the process . . . An ignorant reader might come to the conclusion that I was right. But, my case would not, in fact, be valid, since I would have omitted the whole of the second part. And the second part is that Miguel de Cervantes scrawled with a quill-pen and smudged his fingers, but in doing so he left to posterity a work called "Don Quixote", which is considered a unique literary monument. His merit does not lie so much in getting ink all over his fingers, but in writting "Don Quixote". The difficulty in Bernadette's ease was not so much her eating grass, or smearing mud over her cheeks, but in her scraping away a little soil and bringing to light a spring that now produces 29,000 gallons of water a day, and survives all droughts and has hundreds of inexplicable cures to its credit.

   If Monroy feels really ravenous one day and likes to try eating grass, and if, by so doing, he comes up with a similar achievement, let him notify me at once and I solemnly promise to write a book extolling his praises and to withdraw this work of mine from circulation.

Monroy lets fly

10.—In the next few chapters, Monroy claims that Purgatory is non-existent. This leads him to conclude that the apparitions at Lourdes and Fatima could not be real since the children spoke of a vision of Purgatory. He declares the emphasis on recitation of the rosary to be yet another contradiction, because the rosary is a pagan practice. He is struck by the fact that the Virgin should have taken part in the recitation of a rosary in her own honor,* making out that the Virgin of Garabandal seems to have been sent by the Vatican rather

*   At Garabandal, the Vision said the rosary with the visionaries to teach them how to pronounce it properly. But, according to the children, when She herself took part in the prayers, she only said the "Glory be to the Father."

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