It isn’t easy to assess miracles when someone lives in what Carl Sagan once called a demon-haunted world. That kind of world operates with way different rules than our real one does. However, it’s nice to see some Christians trying to analyze miracles for divine meddling. Today, let’s see how Catholic leaders recently tried to make miracles easier to assess—and way less embarrassing to share space with.
(From introduction: My post about climate change predictions. From ‘daffy miracles’ segue: Virgin Mary’s Milk in Bethlehem. And in Constantinople. The Florida milk grotto. Calvin’s remark about Mary’s milk miracles.)
(This post went live on Patreon on 6/18/2024. Its audio ‘cast lives there too and is available now!)
It’s tough to claim miracles these days
Years ago, the webcomic xkcd made an interesting observation (archive): With the sharp rise in the percentage of Americans carrying cameras everywhere with them during every waking moment, we’ve settled a number of supernatural questions: “Flying saucers, lake monsters, ghosts, and Bigfoot.
The artist in this case didn’t mention religious miracles. But he sure could have.
Nowadays, Christian miracles take many forms. They can range from erroneous or knowingly dishonest claims of resurrection all the way down to extremely minor coincidences that Christians erroneously or knowingly dishonestly claim are an omnimax god’s action on their behalf. In between those extremes, we find magical healing, divine boosts in recruitment, visions or prophecies about the secret now or the near future, and tooth fillings turning into gold somehow.
Officially, nobody speaks for all Protestants in terms of what types of miracles they should accept as valid. That said, many of them sure try to be the one authority on miracles.
Over at the evangelical site Renew, we find a post about five distinct types of miracles (archive): Creational, sustaining (making him feel good about his faith), providential (coincidences), predictive (prophecies), and suspension (violations of the laws of nature). Its writer, of course, provides absolutely no examples of real-world miracles of these types beyond the one about feeling good to be Christian. Nor does he seem in the least inclined even to critically examine the types he cites.
Catholics, however, most certainly do investigate serious claims of miracles in the real world. In a lot of ways, they must: Anyone they plan to make a canon saint must produce two bona fide miracles after death. So miracle verification in Catholicism occurs during the canonization process. They don’t seem to worry overmuch about miracles in any other context.
Or at least, they didn’t until recently.
Miracles and saints in Catholicism
Some years back, when Catholic leaders confirmed Pope John Paul II’s second actual real posthumous miracle, NBC offered some information about the various levels of sainthood:
- A confirmed life of virtue and piety makes the dead person “a servant of God.”
- Absolutely “heroic levels of virtue” makes the dead person “venerable.” (Example: Venerable Bede.)
- Two posthumous miracles make the dead person an actual saint. However, a successful claim requires that someone prayed for the miracle to occur, and moreover prayed only to that one dead person.
Catholic leaders have defined miracles as something that happens without any natural explanation (archive). To confirm a miracle, people must eliminate all possible natural explanations for the happening. That doesn’t 100% PROVE YES PROVE a miracle occurred, no. But to religious people, such a confirmation does strongly hint at a divine origin for the happening.
That NBC article also tells us that “99.9 percent of these [claims] are medical miracles.” But Catholic authorities reject most of these claims because the person involved had at least a tiny chance of survival. Medical miracles require a zero-percent prediction of survival and for healing prayers to have been dedicated to one dead person only. Both of John Paul II’s miracles are medical miracles of this nature. (Of interest, John Paul II changed the number of required posthumous miracles from three to two. Lucky him!)
But miracles don’t just happen thanks to dead people intervening on behalf of the living. They happen all the time in Catholicism. And the top brass in that religion just made some big changes to how they plan to evaluate the many, many miracles claimed by the faithful.
The ongoing lizard-people takeover of Catholicism continues apace: verifying miracles is big business
Miracle verification is big business in Catholicism because of its tight link with canonization. In the Vatican, the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints handles sainthood applications.
A dicastery is a Catholic religious department that judges or assesses something. The other main one in Catholicism is the far-better-known Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, which makes decisions about what doctrinal beliefs Catholics should hold. Interestingly, it also handles sex abuse cases. (Just two weeks ago, Francis appointed new leaders to it as part of his ongoing battle with doctrinal hardliners.)
The already-mentioned John Paul II didn’t only reduce the number of required miracles for sainthood. He also tried to streamline the entire process to make the road to sainthood a faster one. Unfortunately, we learn from America magazine (archive), both of these changes resulted in money doing the real talking in canonization.
In Catholicism, whoever advances the dead person’s sainthood claim must also pay for the verification process. Very often, they also must hire a postulator, who is a sort of lobbyist and point man for the sainthood quest. Toward the end of John Paul II’s reign, that quest cost over half a million dollars. Once paid, that money tended to fall into the black hole of secret bank accounts and legions of professionals both in and out of Catholicism.
Overhauling the verifying of miracles
Starting in 2013, Pope Francis decided that his miracle-verification department needed some serious overhauls. He introduced major oversight to the canonization process, including transparency in accounting and money handling. In addition, he blocked the bank accounts of some 400 Catholic postulators—probably to prevent bad actors from preying upon the unwary.
But all of this stuff concerns canonization.
For the most part, as I mentioned, the Catholic mother ship has for years quietly allowed the faithful flocks to claim whatever the heck they want about miracles. For many centuries, miracles have represented—in Catholic minds at least—a potent sign of their god’s meddling in the real world. They could be incredibly daffy-sounding (archive) or completely implausible (archive), yes, but they all had a distinct function to perform in the minds of the faithful.
The road to sainthood can be very rocky indeed, but most Catholics will never tangle with any of that stuff. Instead, they focus more on miracles that aren’t related to canonization at all. These are what I call loose miracles, as in not tethered to sainthood claims.
A new announcement about miracles
In a document released by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (yes, which started life as the Inquisition in the 16th century), we learn about the newest reforms occurring around miracle verification (archive). This document represents a very serious change in how the mother ship views miracles of the non-sainthood type.
First and foremost, the mother ship has announced it will stop declaring anything as “supernatural.” Good. Supernatural is just another word for imaginary. However, it’s weird to see the Vatican going there.
This new order includes pilgrimage sites, incidentally. The Vatican will promote and encourage pilgrimages to these sites, but it won’t comment on the validity of supernatural claims about the sites.
Second, the mother ship forbids any church leaders from declaring anything supernatural. Instead, they’ll just let laypeople decide what they please in those matters. Bishops may decide to investigate claims, but they don’t have to do it. Moreover, bishops must step in to stop any miracles that contradict or mangle Catholic teachings, or that cause “immoral psychopathic behavior.”
Third, if any bishops want to investigate a loose miracle claim, they have 60ish procedures to follow. If the claim gets past all those steps, then the bishop may submit it to the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith.
Once the dicastery has finished its own investigation, it puts the claim in one of six categories:
- Nihil obstat (it seems legit)
- Prae oculis habeatur (it might be legit, but it must be navigated very carefully)
- Curatur (maybe legit, but this one’s gone viral; keep PR in mind at all times)
- Sub mandato (maybe legit, but it’s being misused by bad-faith actors)
- Prohibetur et obstruatur (might be legit, but this one’s way way way too hot to handle)
- Declaratio de non supernaturalitate (it’s not legit).
However, even Nihil obstat doesn’t 100% PROVE YES PROVE that a claim is truly miraculous.
Why the Vatican seems nervous about loose miracles
The Vatican’s announcement (relink) has some intriguing details in it. While reading it, I got the distinct impression that Catholic leaders have been burned hard by miracles that turned out to be purely earthly in nature. Under “New Aspects,” they explicitly state how miracles could go either way, and make Catholic leaders look dumb in either case:
In 1956, the Bishop issued a final judgment of “not supernatural,” and the following year, the Holy Office approved the Bishop’s decision. Then, the approval of that veneration was sought again. In 1974, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith declared the alleged apparitions to be “constat de non supernaturalitate.” Thereafter, in 1996, the local Bishop positively recognized the devotion, and in 2002, another Bishop from the same place recognized the “supernatural origin” of the apparitions, leading to the spread of the devotion to other countries. Finally, in 2020, at the request of the Congregation, a new Bishop reiterated the Congregation’s earlier “negative judgment,” requiring the cessation of any public disclosures regarding the alleged apparitions and revelations. Thus, it took about seventy excruciating years to bring the whole matter to a conclusion.
Mainly, Catholic leaders wish to avoid creating “confusion” in their followers’ minds. Going back and forth about a claim’s validity can do that very easily.
Moreover, Catholic leaders seem acutely aware that many miracle claims contradict Catholic teachings, or take forms that seem confusing to laypeople. In addition to judging the claims’ merits on their own, bishops also must take into account these “negative criteria”:
1°. The possibility of a manifest error about the event;
2°. Potential doctrinal errors. One must consider the possibility that the person claiming to be the recipient of the events of supernatural origin may have added—even unconsciously—purely human elements or some error of a natural order to a private revelation, not due to bad intentions, but to the subjective perception of the phenomenon;
3°. A sectarian spirit that breeds division in the Church;
4°. An overt pursuit of profit, power, fame, social recognition, or other personal interest closely linked to the event;
5°. Gravely immoral actions committed by the subject or the subject’s followers at or around the time of the event;
6°. Psychological alterations or psychopathic tendencies in the person that may have exerted an influence on the alleged supernatural event. Also, any psychosis, collective hysteria, and other elements traceable to a pathological context should be considered.
They add:
The use of purported supernatural experiences or recognized mystical elements as a means of or a pretext for exerting control over people or carrying out abuses is to be considered of particular moral gravity.
Yes, I’d agree. Abusive ministers in general love to borrow authority from miracle claims and mystic pronouncements.
Shrines, pilgrimages, and the supposed miracles occurring there
Ever since the Dark Ages, shrines and pilgrimages have made local Catholic leaders big money. One 12th-century travelogue, now called The Marvels of Rome, specifically guided pilgrims through Rome’s various dilapidated monuments and churches. As well, it regaled readers with stories of the myths and legends around some of them.
At the time, Rome was nowhere near its height of grandeur. It was a stinky backwater full of corrupt clerics along with their mistresses and prostitutes, with some few thousands of other residents huddled in ancient houses along the Tiber. But in just another century or two, Rome’s religious leaders finally realized they were sitting on a gold mine. That’s when the grand age of Roman pilgrimage truly began.
With this new announcement, Catholic leaders can continue to reap the benefits of the entire shrine/pilgrimage system in Catholicism—but without potentially embarrassing themselves so much. Sure, the “Our Lady of Medjugorje” shrine in Bosnia has sparked some 42,000 miracle claims, which isn’t bad for six kids lying their asses off. Indeed, they started a hoax whose investigation has routinely made Catholic leaders look like chumps. But as Christopher Hitchens noted in 1999 (archive):
So holy mother church has reached a compromise, whereby the faithful are neither enjoined to worship at Medjugorge nor discouraged from doing so. On the verge of the millennium, Rome does not need another embarrassing bogus revelation.
His article for Salon covers all of the bad-faith ground at Medjugorje that the new announcement seeks to end.
All said, this announcement was actually a smart business move on Catholic leaders’ part. As humanity’s knowledge grows, our understanding of these so-called miracles does as well. There’s never been a single divine move that’s survived investigation and critical analysis. By avoiding the topic entirely, Catholic leaders will look way less gullible and ignorant.
However, their unwillingness to jump on miracles with both feet may frustrate and confuse their followers. Somehow, Catholic leaders have become far more scholarly and less literalist in recent decades while their followers have trended in the opposite direction. The sheer number of their miracle claims—and their absolute random zaniness—has astonished me.
Miracles, miracles everywhere, but not a drop of veracity to drink
There’s something truly pagan about Catholic-style miracles. You just don’t get the same vibe from Protestant ones. In Catholicism, saints and angels interfere in life in some truly surprising ways. Sites become shrines and pilgrimage destinations for reasons that are both mundane and wacky.
(See also: The Japanese site of Jesus’ tomb. Yes, really. Dude got around.)
And yet somehow, the god of Christianity has steadfastly refused to provide any real support for his followers’ claims. Even when Christians think they have thoroughly exhausted all earthly explanations for an event, they’ve clearly missed at least one!
That’s why investigators never rest on demons as an explanation for mysterious deaths. Or divine prophecy as a substitute for good investment advice. When someone’s got decent health insurance, they don’t need to rely solely on prayer when they spike a bad fever, get hit by a car, or need help conceiving.
Perhaps playing more coy about miracles will help Catholic leaders retain slightly more of their existing customers. Either way, at least they won’t look as dumb as Protestant leaders who try to claim miracles around every bush.
NEXT UP: Speaking of bushes, good fruit cannot come from a bad tree. Southern Baptists know all about spiritual fruit. But they ignore this Bible guideline like they do all the rest of the book whenever obedience gets inconvenient. We’ll see how next time!
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