It occurs to me that, today being the memorial of the apparition of Our Lady of Lourdes, some people here may appreciate a higher definition version of the 1943 movie, "The Song of Bernadette", which introduced Jennifer Jones* as a leading lady and with a top-drawer supporting cast. The screenplay, adapted from the novel by Franz Werfel, a Jewish writer from Prague who was sheltered in Lourdes as he sought asylum over the Pyrenees after the Vichy government began to cooperate with German eradication plans for Jews in France, and who wrote his novel as a testimony to Lourdes. While not a factual documentary, the espirit of the writing, acting and production was a worthy witness. (Btw, the location used for the grotto was in what is now Malibu Creek State Park on the leeward side of the Santa Monica Mountains north of Malibu, a not bad proxy for the Pyrenean foothills).

In my view, while there are many other accounts of other apparitions, of those of the modern era, those at Lourdes are distinguished for their utter simplicity and their integrity in the form of the extraordinary witness of the life of the visionary before, during and after the fact in consonance with them. A worthy treatment of the apparitions from a secular but sympathetic viewpoint can be found in "Lourdes: Body and Spirit in The Secular Age" (1999) by Ruth Harris.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6zAoq8tRfI

* Jones got the part because she was the only candidate who apparently credibly portrayed an inner transformation in her visionary encounters; to give some sense of beholding someone who is beholding a portal between earth and Heaven. She does it so well that the (uncredited) use of Linda Darnell to portray the BVM in retrospect was unnecessary. Jennifer Jones got her career off to a great start, with Academy Award nominations for her first three roles, a few years after another leading lady of the early 1940s, Teresa Wright, did the same thing.