Exactly. One complaint is that untrained volunteers were making medical decisions… well, yeah. Because medically-trained people were elsewhere, earning the money that their training allows them to get.
Despite the left’s love for admonishing people to check their privilege, there remains here an astonishing lack of comprehension about what poverty is. Poverty is not having to settle for a small TV.
So suppose that the wife was wrong to and MT was not actually in heaven. Isn’t it possible that God in his infinite mercy would decide to heal her husband anyway? Or is it the case that if you don’t say the magic words and guess right about who’s in heaven God looks down and proclaims “You didn’t say Simon says, no miracle for you!”
If so, God’s kind of a dick.
I’ll pray for you. 
The answer is, of course: yes, it’s possible. That’s why it’s possible that the Church is wrong with respect to a given saint, and why there are certainly many others in Heaven that the Church didn’t recognize as saints.
At a more fundamental level, though, your question strikes at the efficacy of my first sentence, or more accurately at the general concept of asking others to pray on your behalf. That’s very common in virtually all Christian faiths: “My Aunt Becky is having gall bladder surgery tomorrow.” “Oh, dear, I’ll keep her in my prayers.”
You might just as well point out that if Becky’s niece has few friends, ol’ Beck is screwed, and if she’s popular and can elicit many people praying, Becky has a much better chance in surgery, therefore God’s a dick.
But this view is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of why we pray, and you’re not alone; many of the faithful share, at some level, this same misunderstanding. I like to call it the Louann Fallacy, after a bit of dialog from Louann Platter, the loveable but air headed character on the animated “King of the Hill,” TV series.
I’d say the vast majority of religious people think of it that way. If so, wouldn’t you have the misunderstanding?
Other than to say that my understanding is wrong, you didn’t come out and say what you think the correct view of prayer is so I can’t be sure, but I think I actually have the same view of prayer as you. I’m just arguing that that is difficult to reconcile with the Catholic Churches view of miracles. If the views below aren’t more or less what you believe please spell out what you do believe, I’m genuinely curious.
Most Christian apologists that I’ve read suggest that the purpose of prayer is not so much to tell god what you want (after all he already knows Mathew 6:8) and move him to give it to you allows you to commune with god to find peace and accept his will, and get a greater understanding of him. With this in mind I might want my friends to pray for my sick wife because it would provide them a way to demonstrate their love for her, and possibly elicit compassion and understanding about her condition. This is all cool, and if I were still a believer, this is a view of prayer that I can get behind. In this case god does as he wills and as is best for the world and if in praying you leave out a word or phrase, it doesn’t matter.
But the church is using the evidence that a woman who prayed to MT got the miracle she asked for as evidence that MT is in heaven. In order for this reasoning to be sound, it must be the case that if the wife did not pray to a legitimate saint then the miracle would likely not have been answered.
OR to put it in formal logic terms.
A: She prayed to a legitimate saint.
B: the woman’s husband was healed
The Church is arguing that “B likely implies** A**” which is logically equivalent to “not A likely implies not B”.
So either having a prayer to MT being answered has no bearing on whether MT is a saint, or else Miracles are very dependent on exactly who you pray to.
It may sound like I’m just being snarky here (especially with that dick comment, but hey its the pit) but I’m genuinely curious as what the Catholic doctrine is concerning the logic of attributing miracles to particular saints.
I don’t deny that the misunderstanding is widespread. But if you heard me asking for prayers for a sick relative, you might infer things about my belief that are not correct.
In other words, while the misunderstanding is common, I’d say its easy to mistake the practice of prayer as universally flawed for this reason. Yet not all prayerful requests are tied to a belief that we can nudge God’s decisions.
Hey, I’m devoutly Catholic, but perfectly comfortable tossing around the debatable proposition that God is a dick. In my view, if the creator of the universe is offended by the creatures he created using the minds he created and the intelligence those minds possess to discuss the genuine issues of doubt that arise about Him and His will (or his existence, or malice, or dick-ness) then there’s nothing to be done… since such doubts and discussions are an inevitable consequences of having those minds in the first place.
And this is not an easy topic. James 5:16 “Therefore, confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another so that you may be healed. The effective prayer of a righteous man can accomplish much.”
So that’s settled. Except 1 John 3:19 “We will know by this that we are of the truth, and will assure our heart before Him in whatever our heart condemns us; for God is greater than our heart and knows all things.”
So what the heck? How can God know all things and yet be swayed such that our prayer is accomplishing anything?
The problem with asking this question is that we are trying to understand God’s mind. It’s as though you sat down with a first grader and laid out the principles of contour integration. We cannot reconcile plenty of things about God – hell, the problem of evil is center stage on this list. Why does a benevolent God permit evil at all?
But what we believe from a Catholic perspective is that what God wants for us is to discern and walk in His will. Discerning His will is not straightforward, to be sure, but if our prayer includes an understanding that the overriding precept, beyond the specific result we ask for, is the gift of discerning and following His will. So when we pray for the intercession of a particular saint, we believe that person is in Heaven, closer to God than we are, and at least as able as we are to discern His will and walk in the path He seeks for us. And if the result we sought occurs, we take that as an indicia that this was so.
Of course, we could be fooling ourselves – this is not a repeatable, double-blind experiment. If three people pray for the intercession of three different putative saints, and the result occurs, which saint is responsible? Perhaps all, perhaps none.
But one thing is certain: if the person’s memory and legacy are inspiring people to ask for intercession, that alone is at least some evidence that whatever sins might have weighed on that soul when he (or she) died, they were probably forgiveable. And if the results happen, that at least suggests that what the prayers were asking for was in the will of God all along, which suggests that they had something right.
So, ultimately, the Church simply does its best. No man, whether Pope or pauper, can say with utter confidence that he knows with utter certainty what decision God made on a particular soul. But we can look at the results that arise and make some reasonable guesses.
And, of course, we’ll all find out, soon enough.
Actually not. You’ll very likely end utterly when you die, and as such, you won’t know you were wrong. Which is a pretty good deal for the believer, really.
Or not. 
By the way, your logic only works when A implies B. Then, as you say, the contrapositive is true: Not B implies Not A.
“Probably” added to the mix is a problem:
A word played in Scrabble probably has a vowel in it.
-compare to-
If a word doesn’t have a vowel in it, it likely wasn’t played in Scrabble.
See the problem? The first statement is correct. But if you try to shoehorn the contrapositive, you run into problems: words over seven letters, for example, almost all have vowels but are not likely to have been played in Scrabble.
Where’s Blaise when you need him?
I’d wager he’s resting quietly in unconscious oblivion. 
Actually, strike this. This example doesn’t prove what I wanted to prove.
Well yes and no. I am unaware of any reports of horrific conditions. I am aware of reports of sub-standard conditions: to me, not using clean needles falls under that category, though it is admittedly borderline. Volunteers would perceive and report on conditions I define as horrific. They might overlook substandard ones though.
Those who think needles that haven’t been autoclaved are horrific might consider US mental health facilities during the 1950s- 1970s. Or some US nursing homes today. (Disclosure: I simply don’t know what US mental hospitals are like now.)
Not clear. The wiki article notes that India doesn’t like giving morphine to clinics and I can’t say that’s bad policy. What about codeine though?
The point being that I’m unconvinced that their policies were wholly driven by a belief that suffering rocks.
That’s a hospital. MT set up and ran third world clinics. Very different.
By my reckoning, the real question is what happened after these conditions were uncovered and published in Lancet. Were they corrected? Did the Catholic Church reconsider their ways? If they just decided to paper over the situation, that is taking a problematic situation and carrying it towards evil. I am unaware of any part of Catholic doctrine that says one should ignore injustice or suffering and just let it go. In fact the Book of Job says the opposite: it is our task to fight against harm, suffering and injustice regardless of whether those conditions were created by angels, men or even G-d himself. Doesn’t matter, according to the Book of Job.
I’ve read evidence that MT ran a dubious organization. Evil? No, not yet.
Yeah my use of “probably” was imprecise. But it is certainly the case that if you are arguing that A provides evidence of B, you have to accept that not B generally implies not A.
Worst lyrics for a national anthem ever!
Whether or not she was evil should be beside the point. It’s whether she should be suitable for being made a saint. Should someone that glorified unnecessary suffering that she had the power to mitigate be made a saint? If the answer to that is “yes” then its the Catholic Church which is evil, not just the Albanian Dwarf.
If I understand Bricker’s explanation correctly, the process of canonization by the RCC is simply the church recognizing that the person has achieved sainthood because they believe he/she is in heaven; new address confirmed thus by the required number of miracles, post-mortem.
In that sense, MT is a saint, whether we like it or not. It’s simply a matter recognizing the fact and quite out of RCC’s hands, I’m afraid. It’s in the rules, you see. Don’t shoot the messenger.
Is that correct, Bricker?
Except it is the Catholic Church who have made the determination that she is in heaven, and it is the Catholic Church who have decided to make a big deal of this instead of just let it quietly go by.
They have not requirement to recognize anyone. They are choosing to do so. Trying to farm off their choice as being inevitable is dishonest.
–bolding mine.
Ever try closing your eyes and wishing something were true real hard? If you have, surely we’d agree that that is a rather shitty way of making wishes become, facts, correct?
I mean if we were to engage in such an uncritical way of thinking, we might even believe there’s an all-powerful entity living inside a communion wafer…who is then savagely devoured in a cleansing cannibalistic ritual.
I’ve seen people put away in straight-jackets for much more tenable beliefs! 