Miracles — A Glimpse Into the Divine
Do supernatural events still happen in our time?
Last weekend, Christians worldwide observed Easter, the holiday centered on what is considered the greatest miracle in Christianity: the resurrection of Jesus from the dead after sacrificing himself to save humanity from sin.
Without a doubt, one topic that comes to mind for many around Easter is miracles — events that defy natural explanation and are thought to be signs of spiritual intervention. As a member of a local community church, I myself have spent much time pondering over the nature and reality of miracles.
Jesus is said to have performed many other miracles while he walked the earth as a human. Most of them involved some type of healing for those afflicted. But that was two thousand years ago, you might say. Are such mystical feats still a thing?
Needless to say, other religions besides Christianity have attested the existence of miracles. The scriptural texts of Judaism, Islam and Buddhism all speak of supernatural events occurring many centuries ago. More than any other religious group, however, Christians testify to miracles happening even in our present day, and rely on them as proof of their beliefs. Are they right?
Miracles, naturally, have to be treated with a good deal of skepticism even today, perhaps especially today. Indeed, it’s not difficult to find examples of “miracles” among Christians that can easily be explained by mental phenomena. The Catholic Church acknowledges this and applies a stringent investigation process to any miracles reported among their adherents.
Many people are familiar with Lourdes, a small city in France where a holy site called the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes is located. Since the reported apparitions of the Virgin Mary there in 1858, it has been a place of pilgrimage and worship for Catholics from all over the world. More notably, it is a popular destination for those seeking a divine cure for illness.
A study of these alleged cures published on PubMed records 4,516 of them happening between 1858 and 1976, with more occurring in the years after. The study describes a number of these cures as being instantaneous. As of this article, the Catholic Church has declared only 70 of them to be definitely miraculous.
One particular story that caught my eye is that of a young Frenchwoman named Marie Bailly, retold by late Hungarian monk Fr. Stanley L. Jaki.
Bailly was suffering from tuberculous peritonitis, a potentially lethal condition that made her abdomen become very swollen with mucus and develop hard masses. On her train to Lourdes in 1902, she met a formerly-Catholic agnostic doctor named Alexis Carrel, who was going there to observe the quick healing rate being reported.
After they arrived, Carrel watched as Bailly had water from the baths of the Lourdes grotto — where the Marian apparitions are said to have taken place — poured on her abdomen three times. By then her situation was dire; the doctors attending to Bailly feared that she would die before reaching the grotto, which was a quarter mile from the hospital where she was staying.
But just an hour after the water was poured on her, Bailly’s abdomen began to deflate. Within a half hour, says Fr. Jaki, it had completely flattened. No discharge of mucus from the body was observed. That evening she was able to eat dinner without vomiting and in the morning she got up from bed on her own. A week later, the hard masses had disappeared and Bailly had completely regained her health.
Testimonies of the event were forwarded to the Lourdes Medical Bureau by three of the doctors including Carrel, along with an account by Bailly herself. Though Carrel did not immediately regain his belief in God, he found himself unable to rationalize what he witnessed by any earthly explanation.
Bailly’s miraculous experience is not counted among the 70 cures declared authentic by the Catholic Church due a technicality regarding Bailly’s diagnosis; they evidently failed to consider pseudosciosis, or the psychologically-induced mimicry of being pregnant. Fr. Jaki convincingly refutes this possibility:
Could so many doctors have misdiagnosed the case? Were all those doctors wrong as they felt through palpation that heavy mucous in the abdomen? For Marie Bailly’s peritonitis produced not liquid but heavy mucous. Palpation can easily establish the presence of that heavy stuff, especially when present in large quantities. Again, where did all that heavy mucous go in 30 minutes? Finally, Marie Bailly passed all the psychological tests with flying colors. She was found to be a person with most sound judgment, a person who was not easily impressionable.
Other miraculous healings at Lourdes also appear to be well supported by the details. One involved Jean-Pierre Bely, a Frenchman cured of multiple sclerosis in 1987 within hours of receiving the Sacrament of the Sick.
Outside of Lourdes, another divine cure is said to have happened in 2006 to a 6-year-old American boy named Jake Finkbonner. He was cured of a flesh-eating bacterial disease after his parents called on the intercession of the Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha, who was subsequently canonized as a saint. Personally, I find this example to be more questionable based on the fact that the infection simply “stopped” and the recovery took place later over an extended period. Still, the timing at which it stopped is quite noteworthy.
Any claim of a miracle should be verified as much as possible, but it’s also wise to keep a reasonable perspective on doubt. For most of us, miracles will always require some faith to believe, which shouldn’t prevent us from doing so if the details give them credibility.
To be sure, belief in the supernatural is very much a matter of faith. It’s also true that no matter how authentic a miraculous event might seem, one can always think of a reason to doubt it. The very nature of miracles is that they defy any ordinary explanation. Consequently, there are some who find it impossible to entertain them as more than natural occurrences, even if they’d like to.
For the rest of us, miracles may yet be still going on in our world, and they may be proof that there is in fact a world beyond this material realm. Some of us experience “miracles” in our everyday lives, like landing a new job and finding a soulmate. One might say that the very existence of everything, supernatural or otherwise, is itself a miracle.
