Miracles: Do They Really Happen?

On October 6, 1946, an anguished father and mother pushed a wheelchair carrying their young son up to the great shrine of Lourdes in France. Two years before, little Guy Leydet had been healthy, normal five year old. Then a severe case of meningo-encephalitis destroyed much of his brain. Guy's arms and legs were now paralyzed; his eyes were vacant and lifeless; he was subject to convulsions. The little boy could no longer speak. Indeed, he could not recognize or respond to people in any way at all.

The Leydets had sought out every form of treatment for their son. Nothing helped. The shrine of Lourdes, famous as a place of miracles, was their last hope.

On this October 6, they wheeled Guy to the bath filled with water from a spring that had appeared at Lourdes 90 years before, when a young peasant girl named Bernadette Soubirous saw the Virgin Mary appear in a grotto by the river. Guy's father waited outside the bath, on his knees. His mother took him inside, undressed him, and waited while nurses dipped the stiff little body into the frigid water.

And then it happened.

As the nurses handed him back to his mother Guy Leydet opened his eyes, stretched out his arms, and cried, "Mama!"

One year later, the Leydets were again at Lourdes, this time to appear before the medical commission that examines claims of healings. Forty doctors examined Guy, applying every test of mental and physical development. Their conclusion: Guy Leydet was in every way a normal, healthy child.

Yet despite the continuing evidence that miracles do happen, many 20th-century Christians find the idea somewhat embarrassing. It is not uncommon to find preachers in the pulpit attempting to explain away even the miracles of the gospel. Jesus did not really multiply the loaves and fishes, they may say. He just encouraged people to share what they had. The resurrection was not a physical event: it was just the disciples' way of saying that Jesus was somehow still living among them.

At Lourdes the process for examining healings has several steps. First there is a medical bureau at Lourdes, where doctors are always on hand to examine anyone who claims a healing. The doctors check to see if the person has really been healed. They also determine whether the nature of the healing allows for a scientific verification, and if so whether the necessary medical records are available.

Only a few cases prove suitable for the next step in the verification procedure: examination by an international medical committee. The doctors on this committee, who are top medical authorities, must answer three questions. First, did the person have a genuine physical illness in the first place? Second, was the person truly and completely healed in an extraordinary way? Finally, the question most difficult to answer, is this healing totally inexplicable by science? It may take years to answer these questions. In the end, even many truly extraordinary healings cannot be judged "totally inexplicable by science."

The rare case that finally passes the medical committee must weather one more test: the bishop of the diocese in which the healed person lives must determine whether the healing can be attributed to God. The bishop considers the circumstances of the healing, the spiritual effects on the person healed and his family, and the fruits of the healing in the parish and local community.

Only when the bishop has discerned the spiritual nature of a healing does he officially declare it a miracle. By that time more than a decade may have passed since the healing occurred. This painstaking procedure has done much to protect the good name of Lourdes and of miracles in general. This system has drawbacks as well. The process of verification has grown more and more difficult in recent years because doctors much search ever harder for possible explanations for each cure. Sometimes even when the medical committee has declared a healing genuine and inexplicable, the local bishop in the case has turned to other doctors for further test and verification. As a result there were no miracles officially declared at Lourdes from 1965 to 1977.

Even more troubling than the sheer difficulty of scientific verification, however, is that fact that demands for absolute proof of a miracle fail to do justice to the real nature of God's work. Miracles are not necessarily given by God to be verified. Christ himself refused the request of the scribes to work a miracle as proof, God is not a guinea pig we can study and experiment on in a laboratory. It is useful to examine the really serious healings, but to try to find an absolute proof is impossible, because when God does something very extraordinary he does it in half light, half shadow. Even for the Shroud of Turin we have an admirable convergence of solid proof, but when it comes to drawing a final conclusion the scientific approach stops and cannot say more.

A doctor at Lourdes once said about a man healed of diabetes, 'The man had diabetes, but if he simply stopped drinking, that could have been enough to arrest the diabetes.' So we cannot verify this healing as a miracle. Yet is it less important if this man was healed because he stopped drinking than if God had done an extraordinary miracle? Is it not a miracle when a man who is drinking ceases to drink, or when a man who is dependent on drugs not take drugs?" Why is the church so cautious about miracles? Why does it demand such rigorous proofs before it will assert that God has intervened in some extraordinary way?

"The church is always somewhat distrustful of claims about miracles because of the risk of delusion, of credulity, of suggestion, of illuminism. The normal life of faith includes the status of night. As the gospel of John says, 'Happy are those who do not see and yet believe' (John 20:29). There are good reasons to be cautions about miracles.

"Yet it has also happened in recent times that a rationalistic mentality has taken hold among the clergy and intellectuals of the church, so that the importance of miracles is diminished. It often seems that the church lags one step behind in revolutions of thought. Science today is actually less rationalistic and more open to possibilities that defy reason than some years ago. Yet rationalism in the church is overdeveloped.

In the middle ages the church suffered from an exaggeration of credulity-people were too ready to call things miracles. But now we have the opposite exaggeration: we are closed to the possibility of miracles. We need to be open to the facts without prejudice. Miracle are not impossible.

Since 1977, two healings from Lourdes have been officially declared miracles, ending the 12-year silence. Some of those involved in the verification process have begun to recognize that an excessive rationalism has crept into the system.

Once factor that could further influence attitudes towards miracles is the charismatic renewal. "The renewal has helped the church - and helped me - rediscover the place of miracles," says Fr. Laurentin. "Often people have waited passively in the hope that a miracle would happen, but in the charismatic renewal you prepare the way for God's action by prayer, by cultivating faith, and by giving thanks before the fact. This has helped us to rediscover the way of miracles.

"The gospels speak of the joy of Christ when he sees faith in miracles. When he commends people for having great faith, it is faith in his power to heal them. I think many exegetes today would say these people were superstitious. An example is the woman who said, 'If I can touch the hem of his garment, I will be healed.' Yet Christ praised this woman for having such a real and profound faith in him and for expressing this faith in material terms.

"Sometimes I am a little embarrassed because the gift of God surpasses that which I can imagine as a theologian. But do I have the right as a theologian to say something is suspect because it goes beyond my theories? God does more than I could think. It is not forbidden to him to do a miracle."