What is a miracle?

What is a miracle? By the very etymology of the word — “mirari,” to be amazed — it seems to be a rare, inexplicable blessing that is an occasion of God’s benevolent interference in our lives. These special moments go beyond the upending of our expectations or mere marvels, and they are common to all of us — at least the seeking of them.

We all pray for “miracles” of one sort or another. Perhaps a sports fan prays for an impossible Hail Mary pass at the end of a football game or a student begs God to pass a test that he expects to fail. Someone who despairs of finding a lost wallet might desperately beseech St. Anthony for some help. We hope for that dream job or pray to be lifted from a financial difficulty by some sort of divine intervention.

In times of the serious illness of loved ones, we approach God in great faith with our desperate plea that their lives might be spared. Sometimes the little coincidences of daily life seem to be miraculous reassurances that we are always under the care, protection and watchful eye of a loving Father.

As Catholics, our own miracle stories, big and small, are all woven into the vast tapestry of a faith tradition that embraces supernatural events and celebrates them in ways that we may not even realize. For any of us that wear a Miraculous Medal or scapular in any of its various colors, we are indirectly recalling the time-honored apparitions of the Virgin Mary in which these sacramentals find their origins. Even the most famous of all sacramentals, the rosary, comes from a foundational miracle story that St. Dominic received it in a vision in the year 1208.

Our entire faith rests on the reality of two great supernatural events: the Incarnation and the Resurrection. All around the world Catholics are experiencing a miracle every hour of every day at Mass when bread and wine are truly transformed into the body and blood of Jesus Christ. Even skeptics who dismiss supernatural events outright like famed atheist David Hume who argued that “miracles are impossible because miracles can’t happen” still need to have an explanation for the inexplicable.

However, when it comes to validating healing miracles that are used in the canonizations of saints or those that pass the scrutiny of the Lourdes Medical Commission at the famed site of the 1858 apparitions to St. Bernadette Soubirous, the criteria used by the Catholic Church to determine them to be medically inexplicable are extremely strict.

For a cure, for example, to be considered miraculous, the disease must be serious and impossible (or at least very difficult) to cure by human means and not be in a stage at which it is liable to disappear shortly by itself. No medical treatment must have been given, or it must be certain that the treatment given has no reference to the cure. The healing must be spontaneous, complete and permanent.

Because of these nearly impossible standards, the Lourdes Medical Commission, while documenting over 8,000 extraordinary cures, has only validated 70 of them. When the Vatican investigates a miracle worked through the intercession of a would-be saint as part of the evaluation of whether this person has lived a life of heroic virtue and is with God, interceding for us, the same set of rules is employed.

Medical miracles by themselves are difficult to validate with so many strict guidelines, but in canonization causes, an additional difficulty lies in that the prayers to a potential saint must be only directed exclusively to that singular person (not to other saints in addition). It almost seems to be a miracle that they find any miracles suitable for use in canonizations. The medical commission for the Congregation for the Causes of Saints features over 60 doctors in various specialties and, locally the investigation is spearheaded by an uninvolved doctor appointed by the bishop.

The church has always been enriched by the fruits of miracles. The prodigies produced by Christ established his divinity and attracted disciples to him. The apostles were emboldened with a mandate to work miracles in establishing the church. The Roman emperor Constantine first was inspired to legalize Christianity in the year 312 after witnessing a vision in the sky of the IHS Christogram.

Throughout the ages, religious orders like the Servites and Mercedarians have sprung out of the mystical experiences of their founders. In addition to marking thaumaturgical (wonderworking) saints on feasts throughout the year, we celebrate the supernatural throughout the Roman calendar with commemorations for Divine Mercy, Our Lady of Lourdes, Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, Our Lady of Fatima and Our Lady of Guadalupe.

Some of the most breathtaking churches of the world have a supernatural foundation with four of the largest 12 places of worship (by square footage) in Christendom tracing their origins to an apparition of the Virgin Mary. Countless numbers of people per year go on pilgrimage to sites of miracles all over the world including the millions of sick who seek healing at the waters of Lourdes, and the believers who come at times on their knees to venerate the prodigious image of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City. Additionally, millions of conversions are owed to this vision on Tepeyac hill, as well as to the Miraculous Medal and other devotions that have stemmed from miraculous beginnings.

For all the excitement that miracles can bring, Pope Francis has encouraged us to not think of God as “a magician, with a magic wand.” Miracles can be a source of inspiration for an enlivened relationship with Christ, but it is important to not engage in a distracted pursuit of the latest claim of supernatural phenomena or a modern day Gnosticism, seeking secret knowledge at the expense of an authentic practice of faith grounded in Christ. The Church seeks to safeguard the faithful by performing serious investigations into credible miraculous claims and providing judgments and recommendations on how we should approach these specific instances of the seemingly miraculous.

For the skeptics that might suggest that the church has something to gain by promoting every dubious alleged event in order to attract people back to the pews or inspire people to spend money buying religious paraphernalia at a new shrine, the reality is that the entire unspoken goal of these investigations is to shut down the distraction and prove that nothing miraculous is in fact occurring to return people to a more grounded practice of the faith. Likewise, the investigations are so rigorous that very few claims have even the potential of being considered to be supernatural events.

Most interestingly, even in cases of thoroughly investigated and approved miracles like the famed apparitions at Lourdes and Fatima, the church does not require Catholics to believe in these events or incorporate the devotions into their lives of faith.

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