What about Catholic miracles?

Question 60064.

Reports of Catholic miracles put an evangelical in an awkward spot, and I think we should admit that rather than reaching for a stock answer. Healings at Lourdes, weeping statues, incorrupt bodies, the medical dossiers assembled for canonisations. Are they real, and if some of them are, what follows?

I want to avoid two lazy responses. The first says it is all fraud and superstition, which is not always honest. The second says a miracle proves the theology of whoever reports it, which is not what Scripture teaches. There is a better way through.

Taking the claims seriously

Some accounts of Catholic miracles come with more documentation than most evangelical healing testimonies I have heard. The medical bureau at Lourdes has examined thousands of claims over more than a century and has recognised around seventy as inexplicable, which is a rate of rejection that suggests a genuinely sceptical process.

It will not do to wave that away because we dislike the theology attached. Christians of all people should care about evidence, and dismissing testimony without examining it is the very habit we complain about when sceptics do it to the resurrection.

So let us start by granting that some reports are sincere, some are well documented, and some resist ordinary explanation.

Three possible sources

Scripture allows for more than one source of the extraordinary, and this is where discernment begins.

God may act. He is free to heal anyone He pleases, including people whose doctrine is defective, and He has never made theological accuracy the price of His kindness. Jesus healed ten lepers knowing nine would not return.

Or the cause may be natural but unexplained, which is not the same as supernatural. Or, third, the source may be deceptive. Paul warns of a coming lawless one whose appearance is with all power and false signs and wonders, and Jesus warned that false christs and false prophets would perform signs and wonders. Signs are not self-authenticating.

The test Scripture actually gives

Deuteronomy 13 is the passage that settles this, and it is remarkably blunt. If a prophet arises and gives a sign, and the sign comes to pass, but he says let us go after other gods, you shall not listen. The sign is granted and the messenger is still rejected.

So the biblical test is not does it work but where does it lead. That principle applies evenly. It applies to Catholic miracles, and it applies with equal force to the healing meetings and prophetic conferences that fill certain corners of my own evangelical world.

Apply the test consistently or do not apply it at all. I have no patience with Christians who scrutinise a shrine in France while accepting whatever happens on a stage in Redding.

Where the claims lead

Now the awkward part. Most reported Catholic miracles are attached to a shrine, a relic, an apparition of Mary, or the cause of a saint being canonised, and the practical outcome is increased devotion to Mary or to the saint.

That is the difficulty. Not the healing, but the direction of travel. When an apparition tells the faithful to pray the rosary for the conversion of sinners, the traffic is being routed away from the one mediator to a created person, and there is salvation in no one else.

By the Deuteronomy 13 test, a sign that increases devotion to anyone other than God is not validated by its own occurrence. It is precisely the case the passage was written to cover.

What about incorrupt bodies and weeping statues?

On incorruptibility, the evidence is weaker than the publicity. Several famous cases involved embalming, wax masks over the face, or burial conditions that inhibit decay, and the church’s own investigators have sometimes said so.

Weeping and bleeding images have a poor record under examination. Where investigation has been permitted, capillary action, condensation and outright fraud have accounted for a good many. Where investigation is refused, I draw my own conclusion.

I would not build a case on debunking, though. Even if every one of these were genuine, the Deuteronomy test would still apply, and that is a more solid foundation than an argument about porous marble.

Why I do not conclude that God never acts among Catholics

Let me guard against overcorrection. God is not the property of my denomination, and He answers the prayers of people whose theology I would want to correct, which is a mercy since it means He answers mine.

If a Catholic woman prays for her dying child and the child recovers, I am not going to tell her the devil did it. She prayed to the God who is there and He heard her, as He hears the cry of anyone who calls on Him in trouble.

The point is narrower than it first appears. Catholic miracles connected to shrines, relics and saints do not authenticate the doctrines attached to them. That is the claim I am contesting, and only that.

Miracles were never the main argument anyway

Notice how Jesus treated demands for signs. He called it an evil and adulterous generation that seeks after a sign. He gave miracles freely to the needy and grudgingly to the curious.

And notice the parable of the rich man and Lazarus. If they do not hear Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead. That is the settled biblical estimate of what wonders achieve on their own.

So the church that builds its credibility on Catholic miracles, or on any other miracles, has built on ground Jesus deliberately declined to use. The apostles preached a crucified and risen Saviour and let the signs follow where they would. See also whether Roman Catholicism is Christian.

Catholic miracles and the medical evidence

Let me be more specific about the evidence, since generalities help nobody. The Lourdes medical bureau requires that a cure be complete, lasting, and without adequate medical explanation, and it consults doctors of any faith or none.

Out of an estimated seven thousand claims, roughly seventy have been accepted. That is about one per cent, which tells you the process is not credulous. It also tells you that the overwhelming majority of reported Catholic miracles at the most famous shrine in the world do not survive examination.

For the ones that do, inexplicable is the honest verdict and it is not the same as divinely attested. Medicine has a long history of eventually explaining what it once could not, and a wise man leaves room for that.

Comparing Catholic miracles with the signs in Acts

Set these accounts beside the miracles of the New Testament and the difference in character is striking. Apostolic signs were public, immediate, complete, and performed in the open on people the crowd knew.

A man lame from birth, known to everyone at the temple gate, walking and leaping in front of them. Lazarus four days dead and stinking, called out by name. Nobody needed a committee to assess it.

Reported Catholic miracles tend towards the ambiguous. Slow recoveries, conditions with known spontaneous remission rates, images that behave oddly when nobody is permitted to test them. I am not saying God cannot work quietly. I am saying the evidential weight is not comparable, and it is the evidential claim that is being made.

Keeping the wonder in its place

I do not want to leave the impression that I am against the miraculous. I am a continuationist. I believe God still heals, still answers prayer in ways that astonish, and has not retired from the business of acting in His world.

What I resist is the logic that makes a wonder into a warrant. Pharaoh’s magicians produced signs. The girl at Philippi had a spirit of divination and a paying clientele. even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light, so the presence of power tells you nothing on its own about the source of it.

Weigh reports of Catholic miracles the way you would weigh anything else. Ask what is claimed, what is evidenced, and where the devotion is being directed. Then let the word decide.

So, now what?

When a friend raises this, do not start by attacking the story. Ask what the miracle is meant to prove. Nine times in ten the answer is that it proves the church is true or that the saint is listening, and then you can talk about Deuteronomy 13 without ever having to call anyone a liar.

Then apply the same knife to your own tradition. If we would not accept a sign that pointed people to Mary, we cannot accept a sign that points people to a platform personality either. I have written on that in honouring the Spirit while avoiding charismatic excess.

The safest place to stand is where Scripture puts us. Test everything, hold fast what is good, and let the word rather than the wonder do the deciding. What is your own faith actually resting on this morning?

Even if they do not hear Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead.

Luke 16:31, ESV