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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   2393 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 17, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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The apostles had a very specific charisim of miracles happening all the time, but there are plenty of miracles that have happened since then and are still happening today. St. Padre Pio's life is a more modern example of someone who had "apostolic" things happen all the time around him. There's the guy who's leg grew back, the Life of Christina the Astonishing, St. Joan of Arc, that one guy who could fly, etc. Does dying after consuming the Eucharist for the first time count as a miracle? I don't know.

It seems to me that there has been no end of miracles and miracle claims in the Catholic Church, though of course the sum total might be large but each individual person might not see one in their lifetime.

Actually if you are willing to wait in line and have upper middle class American level resources, you can see a miracle in person if it’s important enough for you. There are pilgrimages specifically to go look at miracles- most famously the tilma of Juan Diego, or the incorrupt saints. The blood of st januarius liquification is also open to the public. Unlike the Easter fire, many of these miracles have been examined scientifically and found not to have another explanation.

Yeah, I think a lot of atheists just don't really look into it, or assume religious people don't actually experience scientifically evaluated miracles in the modern age, because it would be really challenging to their worldview.

Scott Alexander did a review of Fatima recently where he almost started to get worried, but then decided that there are other less clear claims of similar "Sun-dancing" miracles, which makes the first, most widely-attested and most inexplicable natural somehow? Whatever he needs to do to stay sane I guess.

Yeah, I think a lot of atheists just don't really look into it, or assume religious people don't actually experience scientifically evaluated miracles in the modern age, because it would be really challenging to their worldview.

Or we look into them after reading a post like this and find a bunch of hallucinations and poorly-investigated crap that passes for natural phenomenon. Dare you to go start a top-level about your scientifically evaluated miracles and how good the evidence is.

Most of the primary resources are not on the internet, so it wouldn't be an interesting discussion. I could say, "Giovanni Savino's eye was completely blown out in an explosion, Savino has an feeling of a Catholic Saint's presence, then his eye was back. This is attested to by contemporaneous medical records and interviews with witnesses." And then someone would want a scan of the medical records, which I do not have. And so it goes.

If you are a physician or scientist you can contact the Lourdes Medical Bureau. Its records are open to any physician or scientist who wants to make their own investigation or challenge any particular case recognized as “miraculous.” They have incredibly stringent criteria and throw out 95% of cases most others consider to be genuine healing miracles.

And then someone would want a scan of the medical records, which I do not have. And so it goes.

But that's a totally legitimate response to a highly unusual claim without much more evidence than a report by a highly biased source. Given what we know about human cognition, social dynamics, the malleability of memory etc. it's completely reasonable to dismiss this out of hand unless a durable record of this miracle, e.g. photos of his blown off skull on the construction site and the happily healed Savino in his hospital bed the next day after, exist. If it weren't, on what grounds do you (presumably, given its pagan association) dismiss this list of ancient miracle healings performed by the gods Asklepios and Apollo at the sanctuary at Epidauros?

Why would I deny a list of ancient miracle healings performed by Apollo? God loves all His creatures and may bestow on any of us a healing if we try to reach out to Him the way we know how.

Actual people's medical records are not going to be available online in the clear. I'm sorry. If you're a doctor/researcher you can request them. Does the Church need to digitize more? No question there. Maybe in 100 years a lot of the original copies of witness testimony will be searchable online. They are working on it, but due to the age of the documents and the fact that many are handwritten it is being done with great care.

For the Catholic Church to recognize a miracle healing in modern times, there needs to be objective criteria indicating the disease before the healing, the healing needs to be spontaneous, and it needs to be complete, no remission.

  1. The 1st criterion is that the disease is serious, of unfavorable prognosis.
  2. Secondly, the disease must be known and listed by medicine.
  3. Thirdly, this disease must be organic, lesional, that is to say that there are objective, biological, radiological criteria, everything that currently exists in medicine; which means that still today we will not recognize cures of pathologies without specific objective criteria such as psychic, psychiatric, functional, nervous diseases, etc. (this does not mean that we cannot cure these diseases
  4. Fourth, there should not be treatment to which healing could be attributed.
  5. The 5th criterion concerns the moment of healing itself: healing must be sudden, sudden, instantaneous, immediate and without convalescence.
  6. Finally, after the healing, there are still two criteria: it must not simply be a regression of the symptoms but a return of all the vital functions, and finally, that it is not simply a remission but a healing, that is to say, lasting and definitive.

The existence of objective medical records indicating a disease that can be measured by outside instruments, and then the instantaneous reversal of the disease which is long lasting, is objective criteria and cannot be dismissed as "human cognition, social dynamics, the malleability of memory."

This is an interesting article published by an athiest medical historian who studied the Vatican archives for three years. Dr. Duffin notes:

What diseases were healed through the intercession of saints? Cancer, orthopedic, and neurological illnesses were steadily prevalent in all time periods, but later cases demanded ever-more-stringent proof of diagnosis with, for example, tissue pathology in cancer, X-ray films in orthopedics, and imaging scans or nerve-conduction studies in neurology.

She goes on to report:

Further to my surprise, the Vatican does not and never did recognize miracles in people who eschew orthodox medicine to rely solely on faith. It strives to consider the latest in medical science; it does not want to be manipulated by the wiles of sensationalists or the aspirations of the gulli- ble. Virtually all healing files referred to the treating physicians by name, even if they did not testify in person. Only two complete files of physical healings made no reference to physicians: both were from the mid-1750s in the cause of John of Kanty (d. 1473).34 Doctors crowd these records.
The increasing medicalization of the Western world is evident. From 1800 forward, and across the complete transcripts that I have examined, the average number of doctors making an appearance in each record increases from approximately two to seven. The trend is apparent when expressed either by year of canonization (as shown in Figure 2) or by year of cure. Prior to 1800, the opinions and actions of physicians were described by nuns, monks, or priests; perhaps greater credence was given to witnesses in holy orders, or possibly, doctors were uninvited or unwilling to testify. By the late eighteenth century, however, attend- ing physicians were routinely summoned to give in-person descriptions of the illnesses and the care they had delivered. Even in the earliest records, medical men were mentioned, whether they testified or not. The same was true for other health providers, including dentists and midwives.

New technologies appear in the Vatican records soon after their invention; the aforementioned Wassermann test, elaborated from 1901 to 1906 to identify syphilis, was used in this 1929 case in its capacity as a “scientific fact,” equated with venereal disease.46 Medicalization is appar- ent in the doctors’ words and deeds recorded in many other files. For example, the stethoscope, first publicized in 1819, was used for diagnosis in a miracle worked eighteen years later.47 Three cases had been healed of respiratory ailments in that eleven-year interval where no stethoscope was used; following this miracle, the diagnosis of most heart or lung problems entailed auscultation as a matter of course. A thermometer was used in an Italian woman cured of postpartum fever in 1881.48 Similarly, as tubercu- losis waxed in importance throughout the nineteenth century, the failure to demonstrate Koch’s bacillus to confirm the diagnosis was prominent in medical reaction to a cure effected in 1885, only three years after Koch’s discovery.49 Photography appeared in a file from 1889.50 X rays together with fluoroscopy appeared in the miracle files less than five years after Roentgen’s famous demonstration.51 Blood pressure measurements soon followed.

Also she found many records of proposed miracles being rejected due to insufficient diagnostic criteria:

Testifying in 1908, a Corsican doctor justified his failure to order a bacteriological examination on the pleural effusion of a forty-nine-year- old nun during her illness three years earlier; he was forced to the abject admission that his diagnosis of tuberculosis had been merely “clinical.” With the benefit of hindsight, the three expert colleagues refused to believe that the nun’s ailment, though “grave,” had been tuberculosis and, therefore, beyond a natural cure.62 This disputed healing was not decisive for the pro- cess of Theophilus of Corte (d. 1740); more evidence was needed.63

This is a funny anecdote:

In 1834, a professorial expert criticized his more humble colleague’s use of bleeding some nineteen years earlier in the care of a middle-aged woman with fever; perversely, the supposed medical error made the cure all the more remarkable in his expert (but anachronistic) eyes: not only had the woman recovered from her illness, she had also managed to survive her doctor’s backward treatment.

How severe are these illnesses that are getting miracle claims?

In 1937, an expert physician claimed (quite wrongly at the time) that X-ray-proven tuberculosis was “axiomatically fatal” in the face of any treatment, whether natural or supernatural; he pointed to the patient’s 1926 recovery to insist that the treating physician’s diagnosis of tuberculosis must have been wrong in the first place.

I recommend reading the whole report, it's quite fun and full of interesting things. But the point is, the records are being kept in a complete form, the information gathered is as concrete as possible, reviewed by experts in the fields, and much different from some random rumor that could just be hearsay.

Why would I deny a list of ancient miracle healings performed by Apollo? God loves all His creatures and may bestow on any of us a healing if we try to reach out to Him the way we know how.

Have you read a few of them? They explicitly claim conscious dialogue with both gods in their full pagan, wider-Greek-pantheon persona, i.e. a much stronger and clearer experience compared to Savino sensing the characteristic smell of St. Pio. Unless God used to like to role-play before becoming a dad, this isn't something that you can file away as "God as seen through various cultural filters", it's an alternative provenance of miracle healing that is straightforwardly contradictory to the Christian tradition.

As for the report: I can't imagine how in the world you think that this strengthens the case for the reality of miracle cures. IMO the most telling part is this:

Using all 636 medical miracles for which I have a “diagnosis,” the miracle cures before 1800 were of visible conditions detectable by any- one, laypeople and medics alike: skin disease, fevers, blindness, convul- sions, paralysis, and lameness. In the nineteenth century, the diagnoses amenable to miracle cure concentrated on specific internal organs and on specified fevers, such as tuberculosis.

Why would this change occur? Isn't it extremely suspicious that right as reliable documentation and photography come around, the diseases amenable to miracle cures shift from bombastic stuff like curing blindness and resurrection to much more murky things which, while treatable and sometimes curable with modern medicine, aren't exhaustively understood in their full breadth to this day? Right after this the author makes the argument that stuff like diseases affecting internal organs can only start to appear once medical instruments get good enough to detect them, so it does make sense that these sorts of miracles start to get more prominent in modernity, but that shouldn't stop blind people from seeing or cripples from walking again.

In essence, it seems like all the cool cases of miracle healing have by now mostly ceased and their documentation amounts to basically hearsay, and nowadays, even though we now have good experts observing them and reliable documentation, all we get is much more mundane stuff like a cancer going into highly unexpected remission. That is still remarkable, true, but it's not something that is so outside of the realm of expected outcomes as growing an eye back is. Medicine isn't physics and there are still billions upon billions being poured into grinding away at various diseases to gain a better mechanical understanding of them, we have no equivalent of Maxwell's equations or Newtonian gravity in medicine that would allows us to confidently predict spontaneous changes in extremely complicated micro-biological processes.

it's an alternative provenance of miracle healing that is straightforwardly contradictory to the Christian tradition.

Actually, early Christian apologists explicitly acknowledged pagan miracles. Interestingly, there is also some evidence that these miracles (in the world of the first century church) ceased, as Christian apologists reference this.

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