Miracles and healing in Lourdes

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The sanctuary of Lourdes receives every year 5 to 6 millions of visitors. It is a huge number. Since 1858, the Catholic church has recognized only 69 miracles in Lourdes. It is a very small number. Why ? To tell if frankly, and contrarily at what many people are thinking, the Catholic church does not like to recognize a miracle happening in Lourdes. If Bernadette is a saint since 1933, it is not because of the apparitions, it is not because of the healing happening in Lourdes, it is because of the exemplarity of her religious life. Our Lady of Lourdes never told to Bernadette that the water of her source would cure anybody, it is the popular faith of people that believed it. Facing since the beginning in 1858 several cases of spontaneous healing, the bishop of the place asked to a doctor to study the files and to give his opinion. Later, in 1884, a Bureau of Medical Findings was installed in the sanctuary. It is still there and the same building welcomes a «Museum of Miraculous» upstairs. I was following 3 Arabic speaking nurses when I went to this museum last week. A doctor was waiting for them at the entrance, welcomed them kindly, and they gave him what was looking like an envelope of radiographies. Another «unexplained healing» ? Since 1884 there has been more than 7200 files recording an unexplained healing deposited in this Bureau. Each case is studied by the doctors with a very strict protocol : 1) the disease should have been authentified and the diagnosis confirmed before the healing ; 2) the medical prognosis has to be clear ; 3) the healing has to be complete, spontaneous, without any convalescence, definitive and without relapse ; 4) none of the medical treatments can be considered like the reason of the healing, and cannot have contributed to it. The last point is the more difficult today, because it is rare when a patient victim of a cancer has not had before coming to Lourdes a chemo or a radiotherapy that might have contributed to the healing. However there are still several unexplained healing admitted by the medicine and transmitted to the Church that makes its own investigation. For the Church, the healing has not only to be a healing it has to be also «a sign of God» sent to this person, and it is the bishop where lives the person who decides wether the healing was or not a miracle. The medicine can take time to decide : on the 2 cases transmitted by the doctors in 2011, one had been cured in 1965, the other in 1989... The Church can take time too, some bishops being very reticent. If I was sarcastic I would tell that it is another miracle if the miraculous is not yet dead when the miracle that happened in Lourdes is authenticated by the Church. Having a miracle recognized by the Church is an obstacle course, and it is more than probable that many cases of healing have never been declared. A study done in the 1990’s was telling that there were statistically as many cases of spontaneous unexplained healing in hospitals than in Lourdes, but you cannot do serious stats like that : if all the cases are known for hospitals, they are definitely not known for Lourdes. It remains me an old medical article criticizing Pasteur when he discovered the rabies vaccine, and showing statistically that the vaccine was inefficient... Indeed you can think that the healing happening in Lourdes are the result of a placebo effect, and that everything happens in the brain. I would object you that if placebos were effective on paralytics and toddlers, it would be known. And indeed you will always find people rejecting the cases that the medicine cannot explain. Speaking of Lourdes, a good example was Emile Zola. The author of the Rougon-Macquart was a skeptic intellectual who was not believing in miracles. Besides he was also an atheist a bit anticlerical. He came to Lourdes in 1892 with a train of pilgrims from Paris and stayed there two weeks with these pilgrims to study the people coming to the sanctuary. As he was a kind of celebrity all the doors were opened for him, from the town hall to the Bureau of medical findings. It might seem ironic, but this man who was not believing in miracles attended at the spontaneous healing of two women condemned by the medicine who had traveled in the same train than him. He put them in the book that he published about Lourdes in 1894, but instead of speaking of healing, he gave them a temporary remission and made them die. Admitting that they had been definitely cured would have ruined his book and his own beliefs/unbeliefs. Believing or denying the healing happening in Lourdes might be finally only... a question of faith. I read a 2015 interview of François-Bernard Michel, the medicine professor presiding the international medical comittee of Lourdes (the second and last level of the medical investigation after the Bureau of medical findings located in Lourdes) to document this article and I have been struck by one of his responses : Question : In your position, are you admirative of what is happening in Lourdes ? R : Yes, because it is a place where I think that the divine reaches land... End of this post : I cannot add anything more after this quote coming from a medicine professor knowing perfectly his subject. Photo : Top left, a group of pilgrims near the Basilica. Top right, the Basilica. Bottom left, the Bureau of Medical Findings. Bottom right, a chapel in the crypt. I took these pictures, use them like you want.