(2 of 5)
In your story about Pierrette Regimbal in TIME [Aug. 27] you have given us (belatedly, but still ahead of the rest of the field, as usual) our first intelligence of what may ultimately prove to have been something about as obscure and unimportant to the world of practical things as the first fantastic puttering around with atomic power. In 1858, when miracles began to be reported at Lourdes, psychology and medicine were little better prepared to investigate and establish the facts accurately than they were in the time of Jeanne d'Arc. If Pierrette is really comparable to Bernadette, then science has an opportunity compared to which a total eclipse of the sun is commonplace — or else religion has the prospect of another Lourdes. . . .
Bernadette was a child of an unemployed French laborer in a family of four that would have been larger had not several of the children died early. Pierrette's father, you say, is a clerk, but, with twelve children, he probably has not much more to spend on each one of them than Francois Soubirous had for each of his four. So both children were definitely underprivileged at the time they first saw their visions. . . .
I hope TIME will be the first news magazine to publish a good picture of Pierrette. I would like very much to see whether the chain of similarities extends so far as to give her the stubborn mouth and straight black eyebrows and great, candid eyes of Bernadette.
(PFC.) LEW CUNNINGHAM
Portland, Ore.
¶ Let Reader Cunningham judge for himself. TIME'S correspondent has visited the uncompleted shrine near Val D'Or, found it busy. The shrine's spring of "holy water" did not suddenly gush forth; it has always been there. Pierrette's most highly regarded "miracle"—restoring speech to the mute son, aged seven, of a local truck driver—is questionable. He was never mute, does not yet talk spontaneously —just repeats words. Says TIME'S correspondent: "The inhabitants of this thriving pioneer mining town [TIME, Sept. 24] now are wondering about a different kind of future: is Val D'Or to be another Lourdes?"—ED.
Surplus Property?
Sirs:
One of the assets which the Government has created during the war is a group of publishing properties. These include Army publications such as Yank, Stars & Stripes, and overseas publications of the Office of War Information such as Victory.
Are these valuable properties, with their top-ranking editorial organizations, their huge circulations and their prestige, to be abandoned? Ought there not be some way to continue these properties in the public interest and to salvage for the taxpayers some part of the investment they represent?
Might not Yank, for example, be continued as a permanent publication for the regular Armed Forces? Or might it become the organ of the Veterans Administration ? . . .