Can Recent Scientific Developments Explain Supernatural Phenomena?

Two authors, somewhat similar in literary stature in Europe and the United States, wrote about the remarkable story of a mid-19th-century provincial French girl named Bernadette Soubirous (1844-1879). The Czech-born Franz Werfel (1890-1945) recounted the true tale in novel form, while the French novelist Michel de Saint-Pierre (1916-1987) wrote it as an investigative journalist. Werfel’s lyrical novel, The Song of Bernadette (translated from German by Ludwig Lewisohn and published in the U.S. in 1942), became a national bestseller, spending 13 weeks atop The New York Times’ prestigious list. Two years later, it was made into a motion picture of the same name, attaining tremendous popularity and winning four of the eight Academy Awards for which it was nominated, including Best Picture. It also won the Golden Globe award for Best Picture.

A decade later, de Saint-Pierre, a prolific Catholic novelist, wrote a thoroughly researched biography of Mademoiselle Soubirous. Titled Bernadette and Lourdes, it was first published in Paris in 1952. The splendid English translation by Edward Fitzgerald, glowing with luminous and faith-affirming prose, was published in 1954 and was followed by a paperback edition a year later. Regrettably, both the hardcover and paperback editions have been out of print for many years.

De Saint-Pierre’s far more accurate account never attained the popular — that is, commercial — success that Werfel’s novel did, although it was as deserving, perhaps more so. Whereas The Song of Bernadette revealed the novelist’s freedom to liberate his expansive and rich imagination to create scenes and dialogue (albeit plausible) among family members, friends, civil authorities, and important clerics of the time, de Saint-Pierre cited only the original, authentic transcripts that those same authorities had faithfully recorded, as well as — most importantly — the writings of Bernadette herself and the many depositions she was forced to give.

An example illustrating Werfel’s literary license and historical inaccuracy involves the Bouhouhorts family, whom he places in the house next door to the Soubirouses, with the wives as dear friends. The Bouhouhorts have but one child, a sickly, deformed two-year-old boy who is subject to convulsions. Bernadette’s mother, Louise, who has “a reputation for uncommon medical ability,” is the only one who can calm the convulsed child. Doctors agree that he is too weak to live. As a matter of fact, this family was completely unknown to the Soubirouses. De Saint-Pierre writes, “In Lourdes there lived a day laborer named Jean Bouhohorts” — note the different spelling — “and his wife, Croisine, together with their two-year-old child, a puny, ill-formed little creature already suffering from a decline…practically at the point of death.”

I cite this not to criticize Werfel but merely to note one of many discrepancies between the two authors’ accounts. Both writers go on to tell of the miraculous curing of the child when his mother immerses him in icy-cold water for a quarter of an hour — the fifth miraculous healing at the Massabielle Grotto near the Pyrenean town of Lourdes. Thousands have occurred since.

A more egregious Werfel fabrication occurs later in the novel, after civil authorities have closed the grotto as a public nuisance in the summer of 1858. Werfel writes that the Emperor Louis Napoleon’s young son, Loulou, is healed of severe illness by drinking a glass of Lourdes water. In de Saint-Pierre’s biography, the second of only two mentions of the emperor says that “at the beginning of October, the Emperor went to Biarritz for the season,” and “high personages at court” conveyed the people’s dissatisfaction with the barricading of the grotto. Wisely, the emperor rescinded his decree. The Lourdes grotto has remained open ever since.

It is not my intent to compare the many instances in which Werfel’s fanciful fictions stray far from factual truths. A decade after the tremendous success of The Song of Bernadette, de Saint-Pierre had this to say about Werfel’s “astonishing inventions”: “They are all figments of Werfel’s over-vivid imagination. I do not question the honesty of the man’s intentions…but…it does seem to me that ordinary respect for truth and simple honesty should forbid any self-respecting author to indulge in the systematic distortion of historical facts to suit his own ends.” Let that serve to remind students and scholars not to search romantic, historical novels for hard, historical facts.

Allow me to encapsulate the story. Innocent and pure, Bernadette, at age 14, was thus chosen by the mightiest power in the universe to have not visions but real, human encounters with the Blessed Virgin Mary. From February 11 to July 16, 1858, there occurred 18 meetings between one supremely immaculate Virgin and one simple, poor, and lowly virgin, resulting in the flowing forth of a spring to which millions have pilgrimaged and by which thousands have been cured.

On January 18, 1862, Msgr. Bertrand Laurence, bishop of Tarbes, issued a decree that cites three criteria that formally confirm that the Blessed Virgin Mary did indeed appear to Bernadette:

1. Reliability of the seer. Bernadette’s testimony was so consistent, earnest, and compelling that both clerical and civil authorities found it difficult to doubt her. They tried to trick and trap her in grueling depositions, but her recounting of the apparitions never varied or wavered.

2. Spiritual fruits. Besides sanctifying Bernadette, processions and pilgrimages revived the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity in the hearts of those who came to the grotto and greatly renewed their devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary.

3. Cures of the body. Between 1858 and 1862 hundreds of cures were examined by leading physicians and scientists. Seven were proclaimed “miraculous” — that is, no medical or scientific explanation of the cure was known.

In 1883 Fr. Rémi Sempé, the first rector of the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes, commissioned Dr. Georges-Fernand Dunot de Saint-Maclou to establish the Bureau of Medical Observations so that no one who thought he had been “cured” would depart Lourdes without submitting his medical history and the story of his cure to a thorough and rigorous medical assessment. Decades later, in 1947, Msgr. Pierre-Marie Théas, bishop of Tarbes and Lourdes, and Dr. François Leuret, then-president of the bureau, launched the Lourdes Medical Committee to recruit doctors and scientists with excellent reputations in their respective fields of specialization. In 1954 Bishop Théas urged the committee to acquire an international character. Thus, members of the International Medical Committee of Lourdes are charged with assessing and certifying (if they can) that a cure, which had been declared “unexplained” by the Bureau of Medical Observation, is indeed unexplainable — that is, miraculous — on the basis of current medical and scientific knowledge.

Faithless minds crave signs; prideful minds demand them. Even the beauty and magnificence of our planet and universe are insufficient for faithless and prideful persons to acknowledge God’s existence, majesty, and power, let alone the truths of the Catholic faith. And yet, through God’s generosity and love, the grotto at Lourdes and its ever-flowing spring (approximately 25,000 gallons a day since 1858) with its miraculous cures are a living, healing, and perpetual sign of God’s kindness toward an errant, sinful, and ever-wondering world.

Right from the beginning, however, arrogant skeptics, freethinkers, atheists, agnostics, and unbelievers dismissed the verifiable and overwhelming scientific evidence of the many unexplained cures at Lourdes. De Saint-Pierre tells of a meeting in 1952 at which he “raised the problem of Lourdes in the presence of skeptical medical men.” In spite of his referencing prominent scientific and medical evidence of the cures at Lourdes, it became obvious to him that they had no interest in the documented facts, revealing instead a vehemently negative attitude, an obstinacy that astonished him. We can presume in 2025 that such obstinacy firmly exists in the minds of our contemporary skeptics, freethinkers, atheists, agnostics, and unbelievers, who, regrettably, share the same closemindedness as the men de Saint-Pierre encountered 73 years ago. Secularists prefer to remain stuck in the muck of a materialism that rejects all supernatural phenomena, foolishly believing themselves enlightened.

Let us return to the actual, unusual, and convincing events that occurred on Thursday, February 25, 1858, when eyewitnesses observed Bernadette’s peculiar behavior during her encounter with “the Lady,” as Bernadette always referred to her. At first, the child moved toward the River Gave, but she then turned toward the grotto and went to a specific spot. There she bent down and began to scrape the dry earth. As de Saint-Pierre writes, “The small cavity she hollowed out with her hands…filled with muddy water. She then drank from it and washed her face. She also plucked a blade or two of grass that was growing there and put it to her mouth.” In Bernadette’s words, the Lady had said, “Go and drink and wash yourself at the spring and eat the green you will find growing there.”

The crowds at the grotto that day hoped to see something miraculous. They did indeed, but they failed to recognize or realize it. Many thought Bernadette had gone mad. Why would a simpleminded child, a slow learner especially of her catechism, behave in such an odd manner? Her distraught, protective parents certainly did not instruct her to perform such unpleasant acts. Neither did her schoolmates. Nor were there any such repugnant urgings from bystanders in the crowd. And Bernadette certainly was not impelled by her own innocent imagination to do such strange and distasteful things. Quite obviously, she was obeying a highly specific command from someone she dared not disobey, someone she alone vividly saw and clearly heard, someone more real than all the others who surrounded her.

Then, quietly, came the miracle. De Saint-Pierre writes, “The next day the stream which had suddenly welled up at the dry spot where Bernadette had scraped…was producing about 25 thousand gallons of water every 24 hours…running freely into the Gave.” Happily, those waters continue flowing to this day. And to this day, miraculous cures still occur.

The Catholic Church professes as dogma that the Blessed Mother Mary, who, upon repeated pleadings from Bernadette, finally gave her name as the “Immaculate Conception,” was conceived without the stain of Original Sin. That woman who bore Jesus Christ was born more than 1,800 years prior to Bernadette’s encountering her as a beautiful, living, and breathing young Lady. How could that possibly be? That is a far more difficult question than questioning the many miraculous cures that have occurred at Lourdes.

The Church also professes as dogmas that Mary was assumed into Heaven, and that the risen Lord, Jesus Christ, ascended into Heaven based on eyewitness testimony. How can these dogmas possibly be reconciled with the physical sciences? Within the context of the Catholic faith, believers accept these things as actual, though not verifiable, facts. Nevertheless, perhaps clues to answer those bewildering questions might be found in all the wonders that science has discovered in the latter decades of the past century and which continue to the present time.

Secular universities and medical institutions have rigorously studied the many near-death and out-of-body experiences reported by thousands since the Swiss-American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross published her seminal findings in On Death and Dying (1969), a widely respected text. More recently, in the May 2022 issue of Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences (vol. 1511, no. 1), a multidisciplinary team of scientists and physicians led by Samuel Parnia, director of Critical Care and Resuscitation Research at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, published a peer-reviewed consensus statement, in which they conclude that “evidence suggests that neither physiological nor cognitive processes end with death” (italics added).

The many recorded, verified, and studied instances of near-death experiences confirm the existence of a transphysical human soul that not only survives death by vacating the confines of the human body but also possesses intelligence, memory, and the abilities of sight, hearing, and speech. The answer to the question Is there conscious life after death? is a resounding Yes!

That brings us to M-theory, a theory in physics that unifies in a single mathematical structure all five consistent versions of string theory. String theory is itself a fairly recent conjecture of theoretical physics, becoming prevalent in the 1970s and 1980s as a way to explain the world in which we live by suggesting that the smallest elements of matter and energy (even smaller than the tiniest subatomic particles discovered by CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Bern, Switzerland) are looped, vibrating strings that give the atomic and subatomic particles their mass and energy. To appreciate M-theory, some historical context is necessary.

In the early decades of the 20th century, three theories became dominant in theoretical physics: Einstein’s special theory of relativity, his general theory of relativity, and quantum theory. The latter was first proposed in 1900 by the German physicist Max Planck. It attempts to explain in mathematical terms the fantastically unpredictable behavior of atomic and subatomic particles. By the end of the 1920s, quantum mechanics had been fully developed by Niels Bohr, Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg, Max Born, Paul Dirac, and others. All three theories have been experimentally confirmed.

Einstein recognized the obvious conflict between his general theory of relativity and quantum theory. The former is a gravity theory that explains the large-scale workings of the universe, the latter a probability theory that explains the workings of the atomic and subatomic world. The mathematics of the two are incompatible, firmly settled in dramatic opposition. Einstein believed such a conflict was inconsistent with divine creation, causing him to spend the last 30 years of his life searching for “the so-called unified field theory” to reconcile the two “in one grand underlying principle.” Now, 70 years after Einstein’s death, theoretical physicists have come to realize that M-theory might provide the framework to achieve the long-sought-after goal of unifying the very large in our universe with the very small. For that reason, it is often called the “theory of everything.”

M-theory is still being developed and refined by physicists and mathematicians around the world. Their work seeks to merge the five separate string theories along with a sixth theory, supergravity, that postulates an eleven-dimension universe containing the three spatial dimensions we perceive, seven concealed spatial dimensions that are “curled up” but have not yet been detected, and the one temporal dimension. “Much of the true nature of M-theory remains mysterious,” writes the physicist Brian Greene in The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory (2011). “Physicists worldwide are working with great vigor to acquire a full understanding of M-theory, and this may well constitute the central problem of twenty-first-century physics.” I would not dare attempt to offer an explanation of the transcendent theory written in the esoteric language of the highest mathematics. Rather, for the purpose of argument, it is sufficient merely to emphasize that M-theory envisions a universe with an additional seven “curled up” hidden dimensions.

A hint at the reality of a multidimensional universe was first devised by the German mathematician Theodor Kaluza in 1919. By applying a fourth spatial dimension to Einstein’s general theory of relativity, Kaluza recognized that “it provided an elegant and compelling framework for weaving together general relativity and [the Scottish mathematician James Clerk] Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory into a single, unified, conceptual framework.” Then, in 1926, the Swedish mathematician Oskar Klein proposed that “the spatial fabric of our universe may have both extended and curled-up dimensions.” It is important at this point to remember that both the general theory of relativity and Maxwell’s theory were experimentally proven to be true and precise explanations of the workings of our physical world.

As previously and briefly discussed, near-death and even out-of-body occurrences have been widely accepted as authentic, human experiences of individuals who in a transphysical — that is, incorporeal — state retained their faculties of sight, hearing, intelligence, and speech, as well as an unhindered freedom of movement. While out of body, these persons observed the happenings and events in our physical world, though they could not be observed (seen) by the persons nearest them who witnessed their clinical deaths. Thus, it seems both obvious and plausible that the immaterial soul exists in a dimension (or dimensions) beyond our sensory limitations, which are trapped, so to speak, within three perceptible spatial ones. Allow me to summarize in a speculative syllogism:

(A) Scientifically verified out-of-body (transphysical) experiences have occurred in what might be a higher-order, spatial, dimensional reality that is imperceptible to living, corporeal persons.

(B) M-theory postulates that seven imperceptible, spatial dimensions exist “curled up” within the three “extended” spatial dimensions of the universe’s space-time fabric.

(C) Thus, out-of-body experiences might provide a degree of proof for a multidimensional universe, as postulated by M-theory.

So, what in Heaven’s name does M-theory have to do with Our Lady of Lourdes?

When we consider apparitions of the beautiful Lady that Bernadette experienced, is it not plausible that the eleven-dimensional universe postulated by M-theory might proffer a scientific explanation for how the Blessed Virgin Mary moved in and out of the four-dimensional world of provincial France, either by God’s will or her own? Conversely, is it reasonable for those of us living almost two centuries after the miraculous apparitions at Lourdes to suggest that Mary’s appearances there, as well as at Fatima, Portugal, in 1917, might be metaphysical evidence in support of M-theory, just as near-death and out-of-body experiences might be?

Catholic believers acknowledge the power and goodness of a loving God to deliver messages to the world through apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Ultimately, will it be science, and M-theory in particular, that explains how our earthly, human experiences, including near-death and out-of-body experiences, relate to the transcendent reality, thus answering the stupendous question of how these remarkable happenings have occurred and will continue to occur?

Another perplexing issue must be addressed: How do human bodies of flesh and blood, such as those of the Blessed Virgin Mary and Our Lord Jesus Christ, exist in this imperceptible, higher-order, multidimensional environment? And why are they imperceptible since they are spatial beings in our universe, which comprises three extended spatial dimensions? Why, for example, was Our Lady of Lourdes visible only to Bernadette and not to the yearning crowds that surrounded her? The answers seem far beyond human understanding, and presently beyond scientific explanation, though I doubt science will ever have all the answers because God’s universe is simply too rich with divine mystery.

So, what really happened at Lourdes? I offer, as possible and probable, that the encounters between the Blessed Virgin Mary and St. Bernadette (she was canonized on December 8, 1933, by Pope Pius XI) were touchpoints at which the multidimensional, metaphysical reality “uncurled” momentarily into our three-dimensional, physical world. Bernadette, singular in her simplicity and purity, was granted the rare privilege of gazing into that reality to behold a beautiful, celestial, and living Lady whom we know as Queen of the Universe, a universe M-theory is struggling to understand.

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