Miracle Business

In the little village of St. Sylvestre de Lotbiniere, 40 miles south of Quebec City, people found it hard to agree on the miracles reported at the Belanger home. Week after week they had seen cars, many of them from the U.S., drive down the village's gravel road and stop before the Belangers' whitewashed house. The visitors were given numbered tickets and ushered into a small, cluttered room. In the center was a round table, in one corner a twelve-inch statue of the Holy Virgin, in another an assortment of canes and crutches. This was the audience room where miracle-seekers met one of the Belanger children--either Andre, 12, Real, 10, Jeanne d'Arc, 9, or Robert, 8.

Three weeks ago 23-year-old Therese Bourgault, for five years unable to walk without crutches, stood before Robert. "You will be cured," he pronounced, and witnesses swore that she walked away without crutches. Not all supplicants found such response. With crowds on hand from 8 a.m. till midnight, the four children had to work in shifts, were often irritable.

At the Table. One day a troubled woman had an audience with Real, who sat at the round table with his father, munching candy and playing with a plastic toy automobile. "Mon petit Real," the woman pleaded, "my kidneys make me very sore at night. What shall I do?" "Big old fool," snapped Real, "I am fed up. You have a cancer." He ran from the room shouting to his father: "We are going to have 700 cars Sunday. Money will come in, eh, Papa?" Papa pulled the boy back into the room. Real then told the woman to pray. As she left, she put a $10 bill in the center of the table.

"The whole thing started," says Pere Belanger, "on the 6th of February, 1948," shortly after two daughters had sickened and died. "A big wind ran through the house, and the children saw their sisters clothed like little saints and accompanied by the Holy Virgin." Soon, Belanger claims, each child acquired equal power and began to perform "many cures."

From the Pulpit. The Belangers had the support of Father Emile Bourassa of St. Patrice de Beaurivage parish. Said he: "Extraordinary things, that seem to come from divine powers, are going on." They recalled that when Father Edmond Pelletier of St. Sylvestre preached a sermon against the miracles, he became so ill that he had to leave the church. That did not stop him from condemning the "miracles" as "the most horrible exploitation of superstition I have ever seen."

Last week Father Pelletier had powerful backing. In Quebec City, after investigating the children and finding "no miraculous event was verified," Archbishop Maurice Roy issued a statement: "We remind all the faithful they must abstain from such superstitious practices. We ask particularly that priests . . . do nothing that would seem to encourage this so-called devotion." Through the newspapers Papa Belanger quickly announced that his house henceforth was closed to visitors.

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