Are we still talking about the thing that happened once?
You’ve whooshed me, sorry.
~Max
OK this miracle, which miracle are you talking about.
(Knocks on microphone- knock knock knock…) Is thing on? Ladies and gentlemen, and everyone, we’re gonna have a musical interlude here while we get things together. This will be followed by a brief commercial break, there are restooms on either side of the aisle.
I think @bobot is saying that something that happens once is easily explained as being a coincidence or happenstance. If there’s a 1 in 100 chance of remission of some cancer and I walk by 100 cancer patients and bless them and one of them is cured, that’s not a miracle. If, instead, I try and cure 100 cancer patients over several years and one of them is cured, that’s the same non-miracle.
Weird medical things happen all the time. Some day, maybe some future saint will fix an amputee.
Now, if this guy had a hotline to God and could really perform miracles, you’d think there would be hundreds to his name.
(The real miracle is that I caught myself spelling “patients” as “patience” before posting this)
It seems god loves beetles but hates amputees.
I thought you needed three miracles for canonization? There’s a movie called The Third Miracle that’s (partly) about the attempt to canonize a woman, and she needs a third miracle.
Not religious at all – never really was even while attending Catholic school – but I love this movie. It’s like watching movies about the supernatural. I really enjoy them as a genre, but the IRL so-called ghost hunters bore me to tears.
Moderating:
It is sometimes hard to resist snarking in lieu of debate. However, please remember the forum you are in and conduct yourself accordingly. Focus on actual debate, if that is possible. If it isn’t, then best to stay out of the thread altogether. Thanks.
No warning issued.
Never mind. humerous, but too snarky.
It is my understanding that if there is a chance of natural remission, it should not be certified as a miracle. The miracle attributed to the intercession of the Blessed Solanus Casey (cited as a genetic skin disorder, ichthyosis vulgaris) is not, to my knowledge, such a disease that is known to go away on its own.
(The skeptic in me wonders whether the woman was misdiagnosed with dry skin, as the Mayo Clinic says that sometimes happens. But I have neither the subject-matter expertise nor the medical records to diagnose her.)
The Vatican has a dedicated medical board which reviews alleged miracles in causes for canonization, and they document their minutes and decisions. But Articles 3 and 19 of the board’s bylaws requires them to swear to secrecy. The verdict of this medical board was quoted by Cardinal Angelo Amato in his summary of the cause (source [Latin], at p. 61),
Medicorum Consilium huius Dicasterii in sessione die 22 mensis Septembris anno 2016 declaravit sanationem celerem, perfectam, constantem et ex scientiae legibus inexplicabilem fuisse.
I don’t read Latin, but Google translates:
The Medical Council of this Department declared in a session on September 22, 2016 that the healing was quick, complete, constant and inexplicable from the laws of science.
Keyword inexplicable.
Aside: Contrary to the assertion given by that website, the Church has certified miraculous restoration of at least one amputated limb. Saint Mary was credited with interceding for the amputee in heaven. See https://www.clairval.com/index.php/ca/carta-ca/?id=2061206
~Max
There’s always a chance. The human body does weird, “miraculous” stuff. And as you allude to a bit later, there’s also the chance that this was entirely a misdiagnosis.
Are these high chances? Not really, not ones that I’d pin my personal hopes on. But are they high enough that when you have tens of thousands of sick people praying for a miracle, some of them will find themselves “healed”, whether though remission or misdiagnosis in the first place? Well, much more likely.
If you are speaking in general terms, I deny the premise. Some diseases are strictly incurable without medical intervention.
I do not know for sure if there is a chance for that particular disease, ichthyosis vulgaris, to go into a natural, sudden, and complete remission. It is my understanding (feel free to correct me if you know better) that this is the kind of genetic disorder which simply cannot go away on its own.
A scientist who determines the woman was correctly diagnosed will conclude that his understanding of the disease as incurable is flawed. Nothing except first principles are fundamentally inexplicable in science. The Church is not a scientific institution; rather than reexamining the nature of the disease, they are content to attribute the cure to divine intervention.
~Max
Well that’s convenient.
I never understood that. When Pope John Paul died, there were plenty of Catholics calling “Sainthood now!”
I cannot remember which rabbis are involved in the following folktale. Two learned rabbis are arguing over a particular point of Jewish law. One is proving his point with cites from the Torah. The other says “If the law is according to me, let that river prove it!”. The river obediently and miraculously picks itself up and changes course. The first rabbi says “This is not a proper cite”. It goes on like this with several more miracles. Eventually, G-d himself speaks from heaven “The second guy is right!” The first rabbi says “When you gave us the Torah, you established the rules for what a cite could be. Even You must follow them.” The Lord concedes the argument.
The law is the law. I cannot fathom changing procedure on what constitutes sainthood just because somebody was popular with the faithful.
It does however tend to improve with age.
In the event there was a miraculous cure, why wouldn’t Casey have interceded on behalf of others with the condition? Or are saints only granted one divine intervention?*
*Even run-of-the-mill genies are known to fulfill three wishes.
And another thing-
As I understand it, you don’t pray TO saints. You ask the saint to intercede with G-d on your behalf and it is the Lord, NOT the saint who works the actual miracle. It’s rather like writing your senator to ask the President for a pardon.
The President, being only human needs senators to tell him or her stuff. Why does G-d need a starship I mean saints?
It’s a logical extension of the idea that you need earthly priests to intercede with God on your behalf.
Or even with medical intervention. But there are lots and lots of people sick people praying for a miracle, and diseases aren’t simple, and neither are our bodies. People have spontaneously cured themselves of a number of diseases thought to have no cure, like HIV. This isn’t even looking at the number of people with this particular disease, this is looking at the number of people with any kind of disease whose treatment eludes modern medical science.
It’s basically p-hacking for miracles.
And a lot could be learned by studying this woman. Either she was misdiagnosed, in which we could learn to do a better job diagnosing this condition in the future, or she developed a unique protein or other genetic tool that repaired the damage done by the malignant mutation, in which case we may learn how to treat it in others. No one in science, and especially medical science, thinks we are anywhere near having all the answers.
This is just another god of the gaps argument. Something happens that we don’t currently have an exact scientific explanation for? Musta been God.
I fail to have found any scientific papers about this case. All I can find is articles in religious publications about the event that don’t link to anything solid. Without knowing what methods they used, it’s hard to say anything about the case, really.
If we want to say a miracle is when anything unlikely happens, then if everyone prays to win the big lottery on Friday, does that mean that if someone wins a miracle occured? Unless it can be proven that this disease has less than a 300 million to one chance of misdiagnosis or spontaneous remission, then someone being “cured” of it is no more miraculous than someone winning the lottery.
How many people prayed to have their disease cured by a saint, and were denied? Did they just not pray hard enough, did the saint already get in their quota of miracles?
Give me a saint that praying to reliably produces otherwise unexplainable medical interventions, and then that’s the miracle.
You don’t seem to understand the way faith works.
Show me any instance of faith actually working, and I’ll see if my understanding is what is actually lacking here.
There are different definitions of faith. You can have faith in things that are reliable and tested, and you can have blind faith in things that have no evidence or are even contradicted by the evidence.
I understand that there are many who will blindly put their faith where they are told to do so by people speaking from positions of authority within the church, that they will take second hand anecdotes of unlikely events as proof of their faith.
I have faith in things that are reliable and tested, and so far, I’ve had much better results.