The Problem with Miracles…

      The Reverend Stanley L. Jaki, a Catholic priest and monk of the Order of St. Benedict as well as Distinguished Professor at Seton Hall University, delivered the annual Joseph M. Gambescia lecture at the 67th Annual Meeting of the Catholic Medical Association, September 13, 1998.  He entitled his presentation “Two Lourdes Miracles and a Nobel Laureate:  What Really Happened?”  I quote from Fr. Jaki’s lecture (www.CatholicCulture.org): 
 

      The Nobel laureate is, of course, Alexis Carrel (1873-1944). He received the Nobel Prize in 1912, for his work in vascular anastomosis. Four years ago the joint authors of an article in Scientific American credited Carrel with having initiated all major advances in modern surgery, including organ transplants. In the 1920s he was a chief celebrity of New York City. Important visitors vied with one another to be admitted to his labs at Rockefeller University. They wanted to see a piece of tissue from the heart of a chicken embryo which Carrel kept alive from 1922 on in a special solution. It became a journalistic cliché to claim that Dr Carrel was on his way to discovering the secret of immortality. Carrel had a brush with immortality in another way. This happened when he witnessed at close range a miraculous cure in Lourdes. In fact, he witnessed two such cures. The second took place in 1910, when he saw the sudden restoration of the sight of an 18-month-old boy who was born blind. 
 

However, the first miracle he witnessed was even more astounding.  Fr. Jaki describes what happened. 
 

      Marie Bailly was born in 1878. Both her father, an optician, and her mother died of tuberculosis. Of her five siblings only one was free of that disease. She was twenty when she first showed symptoms of pulmonary tuberculosis. A year later she was diagnosed with tuberculous meningitis, from which she suddenly recovered when she used Lourdes water. In two more years, in 1901, she came down with tubercular peritonitis. Soon she could not retain food. In March 1902 doctors in Lyons refused to operate on her for fear that she would die on the operating table.

      On May 25, 1902, she begged her friends to smuggle her onto a train that carried sick people to Lourdes. She had to be smuggled because, as a rule, such trains were forbidden to carry dying people. The train left Lyons at noon. At two o'clock next morning she was found dying. Carrel was called. He gave her morphine by the light of a kerosene lamp and stayed with her. Three hours later he diagnosed her case as tuberculous peritonitis and said half aloud that she would not arrive in Lourdes alive. The immediate diagnosis at that time largely depended on the procedure known as palpation.

In Lourdes Marie Bailly was examined by several doctors. On May 27 she insisted on being carried to the Grotto, although the doctors were afraid that she would die on the way there. Carrel himself took such a grim view of her condition that he vowed to become a monk if she reached the Grotto alive, a mere quarter of a mile from the hospital.

      The rest is medical history. It is found in Dossier 54 of the Archives of the Medical Bureau of Lourdes. The Dossier contains the immediate depositions by three doctors, including Carrel, and Marie Bailly's own account, which she wrote in November and gave to Carrel, who then duly forwarded it to the Medical Bureau in Lourdes.

      The highlights of Marie Bailly's own account are as follows: On arriving at the baths adjoining the Grotto, she was not allowed to be immersed. She asked that some water from the baths be poured on her abdomen. It caused her searing pain all over her body. Still she asked for the same again. This time she felt much less pain. When the water was poured on her abdomen the third time, it gave her a very pleasant sensation.

Meanwhile Carrel stood behind her, with a notepad in his hands. He marked the time, the pulse, the facial expression and other clinical details as he witnessed under his very eyes the following: The enormously distended and very hard abdomen began to flatten and within 30 minutes it had completely disappeared. No discharge whatsoever was observed from the body. She was first carried to the Basilica, then to the Medical Bureau, where she was again examined by several doctors, among them Carrel. In the evening she sat up in her bed and had a dinner without vomiting. Early next morning she got up on her own and was already dressed when Carrel saw her again. 
 

      Lourdes, France is where Our Lady appeared to the fourteen year old peasant girl Bernadette Soubirous eighteen times.  The Blessed Virgin identified herself under the title of the Immaculate Conception (dogmatically ascribed to her by Pope Pius IX just four years earlier) and instructed Bernadette to challenge the faithful to pray for the conversion of the world to Christ.  The Church investigated Bernadette’s story for over four years before declaring Lourdes to be an authentic shrine and place of devotion to the Mother of Christ.  Almost immediately pilgrims to the shrine experienced marvelous cures for different diseases, and others who visited the place out of curiosity experienced the very miracle that Our Lady most desires:  conversion of heart to her Son. 

      There are many accounts of healing, like the two mentioned above, nearly seven thousand cases of medically inexplicable cures at Lourdes, sixty-six of which the Church has declared unmistakably miraculous.¹  Dr. Carrel, strangely enough, did not believe in miracles both before and after his experience at Lourdes.  He sought, vainly, explanations elsewhere.  But then he was a fallen away Catholic, and perhaps he felt that to grant the reality of miracles would belie the reasons for his rupture with the Church.  Fr. Jaki gives his own explanation of Carrel’s unbelief, describing for us a man very much steeped in “scientific” materialism, a philosophical, not scientific, presumption against the possibility of miracles, even when one is granted the privilege of witnessing two at first hand: 
 

      Part of that infallible teaching [of the Catholic Church concerning miracles] is that there were, there are, and there forever will be miracles. This is so because the Church is the enduring presence of a supernatural reality, the reality of God's revelation to mankind. That revelation is God's sharing his very life with man and therefore it has to be a most vital matter. Miracles are the most tangible signs of that divine supernatural vitality. Therein lay the rub for Carrel. If anyone did, he knew that what happened to Marie Bailly far exceeded all that medicine could dream of. Yet he could not bring himself to believe that anything more than merely natural forces had been at work in Marie Bailly's sudden recovery. He kept going back to Lourdes so that he might see more sudden cures, more very fast healing of wounds. He hoped that this way he would gain a glimpse of a purely natural force that works miraculous healing and does so through the power of prayer, which he took for a purely natural psychic force. 
 

      Carrel maintained this stance for a long time.  Then, in 1937, he heard of Marie Bailly’s death, she who had, after her cure at Lourdes, joined the Sisters of Charity in Paris to spend the rest of her life consecrated to God and devoted to the care of the poor and the sick.  Perhaps her prayers in heaven came to the aid of Dr. Carrel: 
 

      The next year, Carrel ran into a priest, the Rector of the Major Seminary in Rennes, with whom he quickly developed a rapport. The Rector told him to see a Trappist monk whose first name also happened to be Alexis. His full name was Alexis Presse. Among other important people, Charles de Gaulle was a great admirer of Father Alexis. Father Alexis had by then spent a decade restoring and reopening ruined abbeys all over France. In 1939 he started working on a ruined abbey in Bouquen, that was only an hour's drive from the Carrel's summer residence in Brittany. As he was driving there with his wife, Carrel kept grumbling: Meeting with priests does one more harm than good. They arrived. Out of the ruins came a monk, Father Alexis. He looked at Carrel, who began to feel something strange running through him. Four years later, in November 1944, Carrel was dying in Paris. Word was sent to Father Alexis in Brittany. He jumped on an American military train carrying bananas to the troops still fighting the Germans well beyond Paris. He arrived just in time. Carrel died with the sacraments. 
 

      Again the desire of Our Lady was accomplished; Carrel received the miracle he most needed – conversion to Christ and His Church.  But there are many “reasons” – or rather excuses – for not believing in miracles.  One does not want to be seen as superstitious, and there are all those televangelists who want a financial contribution for the “healing handkerchief” he or she will send you in the mail.  The Catholic Church approaches a claim for a miracle much differently, one could say scientifically.  She investigates.  An anecdote from Fr. Jaki’s lecture serves as an apt illustration: 
 

      There is a story, a true story, that takes us back almost three hundred years, to Rome. A young English aristocrat arrives there and establishes contact with someone high in the Vatican. He wants to know what really happens when miracles are being approved by the Church in support of beatifications and canonizations. He is convinced that Rome carelessly admits any sudden cure as a miracle. In response, his contact in the Vatican gives him a thick dossier about a miraculous cure recently submitted to the Sacred Congregation of Rites. The aristocrat goes home, studies the dossier and a few days later hands it back with the words: This most certainly was a miracle. The Vatican man, still Monsignore Prospero Lambertini and not yet Pope Benedict XIV, replies with a dry smile: the case has already been rejected. 
 

      Perhaps the chief “reason” for not believing in the possibility and reality of miracles is that, as Fr. Jaki has said, they point to a Miracle Worker; and thus the “refuge,” the hiding place of the staunch unbeliever is demolished by the healing waters of Lourdes.  Miracles remind us that there is a God and that we are accountable to Him, our Creator.  Miracles teach us of the far more wonderful efficacy of the Sacraments; and they point to that greatest miracle of all – Christ rising bodily from the dead.  Miracles instruct us that the great, and seemingly impossible fulfillment of God’s promises of coming restoration and perfection of all things will indeed be accomplished.  Miracles humble us by teaching us of our desperate need of God.