Divine Intervention or Rational Explanation?

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'It is our judgement that Mary, the Immaculate Mother of God, did really appear to Bernadette Soubirous in February 1858 and on certain subsequent days-to the number of eighteen times in all-in the grotto of Massabielle, near the town of Lourdes; that this Apparition bears every mark of truth and that the faithful are justified in believing it as certain.'

(Extract from a report on a special commission set up by the Bishop of Tarbes.) The Roman Catholic church has often been criticized for its unflinchingly dogmatic views on certain subjects. It is only fair to state, however, that the authorities in the Vatican do not hold a rigid dogma relating to the many instances of faith healing at Lourdes.

The complex doctrine of the Immaculate Conception was approved in Rome in 1854, only four years before the vision appeared before Bernadette and declared herself to be the Mother of Jesus. The extraordinary events in Lourdes could have prompted the Roman Catholic church to declare that a belief in the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception and a belief that the visions that Bernadette beheld were the Virgin Mary were inextricably linked, but the Church has never stated that the apparitions constitute an article of faith, although some would simply regard this standpoint as an example of the inherent conservatism of the Catholic hierarchy.

It must not be assumed, therefore, that the church has a fixed attitude regarding alleged miracle cures at the shrine. We need only remind ourselves of the tiny minority of cures that the Church has officially proclaimed as miraculous to realize that this is not the case.

The criteria for deciding whether a miracle could have brought about a restoration of health to a person previously afflicted was issued by Pope Benedict XIV in the 18th century. Seven conditions had to be met:

1 The disability or disease must be exceedingly difficult or even impossible to cure, as well as being an illness of a very serious nature. 2 The possibility of the invalid making a recovery from such an illness must be nonexistent. 3 If the person had received previous medical treatment, this treatment must be proved to have had no beneficial effect. 4 The cure must occur almost at once. 5 The cure must be complete. 6 It must be proved that the cure did not arise from natural causes. 7 There must be no relapse of the illness from which the invalid has recovered.

These guidelines are strictly applied, and as a direct result many alleged cases of miracle cures are rejected as non-miraculous. The panel of doctors who study the cases are chosen for their objectivity. The argument for curesarising directly as a result of divine intervention seems strong, but this has not prevented the cynics from attempting to debunk many purported cures.

One of the most notable sceptics was Dr D. J. West, a former President of the Society for Psychical Research, a man thought to have an open mind on matters relating to psychic phenomena. He found much of the evidence for cures self-contradictor}'.

His report, Eleven Lourdes Miracles, was published in 1957 after visiting Lourdes and painstakingly examining the medical records relating to miracle cures. Dr West found that the details of many cases were not as scrupulously kept as had previously been thought. He began to doubt that the original diagnosis of the doctors of particular illnesses were 100 per cent accurate.

He also found that in some cases the doctors could not offer conclusive proof that the patients had not already started to recover before they made the pilgrimage to Lourdes. Furthermore, he found that no proof could be offered that the patients whose cases he examined were suffering from incurable illnesses or disease.

Also, in several of the cases that he chose to study, there were disagreements between members of the medical team, who were unable to decide whether or not the cures defied scientific or medical explanation.

In fairness to Dr West, his report did not actually state that miraculous events did not actually take place at Lourdes, only that the evidence that appeared to lend credibility to the miraculous eradication of illnesses was not as conclusive as it was originally thought to be.

Dr West's report came in for severe criticism from Professor David Morrell, who worked at St Thomas's Hospital in London. He stated correctly that of the eleven cases studied by Dr West, none had proved to have been recoveries that came about as a result of natural causes.

Professor Morrell pointed out that Eleven Lourdes Miracles concentrated on pases from the 1930s and 1940s, when medical tests were much more reliant on clinical findings for the diagnosis of illness. Moreover, he argued that there could obviously be no way of knowing whether an invalid would be miraculously cured following a visit to Lourdes. If it had been known, then previous medical records would undoubtedly have been more carefully kept, he argued. Professor Morrell was particularly condemnatory of Dr West's assertion that hysteria, neurosis and suggestibility were present in some of the cases that he studied. As Professor Morrell said:

'If I see a paralysed patient with contraction flex or spasms and gross neurological signs suddenly cured, I find this difficult to explain irrespective of the diagnosis. The startling thing to me about these cases is that desperately ill patients got suddenly better and stayed better. This is hardly typical of hysterical or functional illness . . .'

We must not overlook the fact that the great majority of visitors to Lourdes are not people suffering from incurable illnesses, but tourists who arrive there simply to satisfy their curiosity and generally enjoy their holiday. This is worth mentioning because it is easy for the sick to get carried away by the sheer atmosphere that Lourdes engenders, which could leave some of them open to suggestibility.

This was doubtless the case when Princess Grace of Monaco arrived at Lourdes with a pilgrimage from her country. One of the pilgrims claimed that a wound on her leg had suddenly disappeared, and many were quick to proclaim this as a miracle. It soon became clear, however, that the wound, which was sustained in a serious road accident, would have disappeared anyway. It was merely a coincidence that the wound began to heal when she visited Lourdes. Of course, stories like this do nothing to explain the mystery of miracle cures, which are presently beyond the realms of scientific explanation.

Many believers in the healing powers of Lourdes often claim that the doctors of some patients have refused to cooperate and have been reluctant to take part in the investigative process. This is cited as one of the reasons why, in some cases, subsequent examinations did not result in the cures being called miraculous. This is not as fanciful as it may sound at first. Nowadays the medical profession has a more open-minded approach to the Lourdes phenomenon, but it was not always so. Such was the degree of scepticism with which the profession viewed events at Lourdes that a doctor who was brave enough to put forward the view that a miracle may have occurred risked being laughed out of his job. Little wonder that so few doctors were willing to cooperate.

This hostility is perhaps best typified by the story of Alexis Carrell in 1902. A young French doctor and an eventual Nobel Prize winner, Carrell went on a pilgrimage to Lourdes, more out of curiosity than anything else. He became aware that one of the sick pilgrims was in such a bad condition that she was spitting blood. Her pulse rate was alarmingly high and her face had turned blue.

Carrell concluded that she was suffering from tuberculosis. He was amazed to observe that once the girl had felt the bath water and taken part in the blessed sacrament procession, she was cured of her illness. In Carrell's book, Journey to Lourdes, he defied the scepticism of his profession by stating that many events at Lourdes 'prove the reality of certain links between psychological and organic processes. They prove the objective value of spiritual activity which has been ignored by doctors, teachers and sociologists.'

It was opinions such as these that only increased the hostility of his colleagues at the university in Lyons where he lectured, and he was forced to leave. What aggrieved Carrell was the fact that his colleagues were so willing to dismiss events he had seen take place in front of his own eyes.

To conclude, we are forced to admit that we are not much nearer to unravelling the mystery of Lourdes than we were when the apparitions first appeared to Bernadette in 1858. Tests have shown that the water at the spring at Lourdes is no more remarkable than the water that we use in everyday life. What is remarkable, of course, is that many people have made recoveries after having come into contact with the water. Until such time as advances in science and medicine can settle these arguments, however, the mystery of Lourdes will remain unsolved.