The Song of Bernadette

The Song of Bernadette

 A Novel By Franz Werfel

Foreword By George Weigel

New Edition of the Classic Best-Selling Novel

This classic story, recounting the miraculous apparitions of the Virgin Mary to Bernadette Soubirous in Lourdes, France, is one of the greatest historical novels of simple and triumphant religious faith published in the twentieth century. 

Franz Werfel, the Jewish author, was a highly respected literary figure in Vienna and an outspoken critic of Hitler when the Nazis occupied Austria in 1938. He escaped to France and found solace and help in the town of Lourdes, where he learned about Bernadette and the 1858 apparitions. When the Nazis invaded France and began deporting Jews to death camps, he was forced to flee again. As he narrowly escaped, he promised God that if he made it safely to America he would "sing the song" of Bernadette. He kept his promise, and his novel became an international best seller and an Academy Award sinning movie. 

"What struck me most about Werfel's craft was how deeply this Jewish writer, who had long been interested in Catholicism but never converted, had entered into Catholicism's sacramental imagination about the world. This story is shot through with a sense of the extraordinary that lies on the far side of the ordinary, revealing itself through the simplest things." ~George Weigel

"By the favor of incomprehensible powers, Bernadette Soubirous had performed a greater miracle than the discovery of a spring. She communicated to the downtrodden something of that compassionate consolation which flooded her being when she saw the Lady again. Inexplicably she transferred to the masses of men a portion in the heaven of her love. The People began to feel that behind the forms, words and rites of the clergy there lay not a vague possibility but an almost tangible reality." ~Franz Werfel

Franz Werfel (1890-1945) was a Czech-born poet, playwright and novelist whose most famous works are The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, an acclaimed historical novel that portrays the Armenian resistance to the fierce onslaught of the Turks during World War I, and The Song of Bernadette.