-Caveat Lector-
>(Literary Review iv '99, reviewing Ruth HARRIS, Lourdes, Penguin, £UK25)
>Everyone should be able to make his own mind up about whether St
>Bernadette of Lourdes saw eighteen apparitions of The Virgin Mary in
>1858? -- No, this has not been the view of the Catholic Church! In a new
>book, it turns out that the figure seen by Bernadette Soubirous, the
>daughter of a Pyrenees miller, was "a tiny, smiling child of her own age
>-- fourteen." It took years of work by the Church to convert this
>apparition into the adult and reasonably maternal Virgin Mary of Catholic
>folklore. Bernadette herself protested all the way along the line against
>the Church's distortion of her story -- and was finally confined to a
>strict regime in a closed nunnery to effect her silence. To this day,
>visitors to Lourdes are not told the truth.
This ignores the fact that the image of Mary as a relatively middleaged
woman is a relatively modern affectation...
And that in Bernadette's culture, the age of 14 was NOT considered a
'child', but WOULD have been considered the age at which girls were
married and started having children...
That was DEFINITELY the age at which girls were married and having
children back in Judea during the Roman era...since in Judaic law, both
girls and boys become adults at the age of 13...boys would usually choose
a bride a few years after their Bar Mitzvah, taking time to establish
themselves in a profession and save up money, to be able to have their own
home and support a wife and children...but girls would usually be
betrothed shortly after their Bat Matzvah, with a marriage ensuing a
fairly short time thereafter...
So in fact, at the time of Jesus' birth, Mary was probably 14 years of
age, no older than 15 at the most...Joseph, her betrothed, was probably
around 17 or 18 years old...
June
*=======================================================================*
The sun was warm but the wind was chill.
You know how it is with an April day:
When the sun is out and the wind is still,
You're one month on in the middle of May.
But if you so much as dare to speak,
A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,
A wind comes off a frozen peak,
And you're two months back in the middle of March.
-- Robert Frost: Two Tramps in Mudtime
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