Miracles in France are not, apparently, what they were. Or not according to the critics of a new initiative in Lourdes, the famous centre of Christian pilgrimage in the mountains of south-west France, known for the scores of Catholic believers who, it is claimed, have recovered from serious illnesses there.
Monsignor Jacques Perrier, bishop of Tarbes and Lourdes and the most senior cleric at the Catholic shrine, announced a ”reform” of miracles there last week. Henceforth, there will be new categories of ”healing” recognised, which take into account advances of modern science. These will include: ”unexpected healings”, ”confirmed healings” and ”exceptional healings”.
Critics say he is ”devaluing” God’s interventions in order to counter increasingly fierce competition in France from evangelical and Pentecostal churches. ”Is this the end of miracles at Lourdes?” asked a headline in the local Dépêche du Midi newspaper.
No, it isn’t, says the bishop. ”This is something I have been thinking about for 15 years. It has got absolutely nothing to do with any other [churches]. It is a totally internal matter,” he told The Observer last week. ”We are no longer in the 19th century and we need to recognise that. Fundamentally, it remains a matter of faith and prayer.”
The problem for Lourdes, a town of 17 000 people devoted to the shrine and the needs of its millions of pilgrims, is that there have not been many miracles recently. A total of 67 miraculous healings have been recognised at Lourdes since 1858, when a 14-year-old peasant girl claimed that she had seen the Virgin Mary in a cave.
However, there have only been four miracles since 1978, the most recent last year when an Italian woman was said to have been healed of acute rheumatism. There are said to be thousands of other healings in the Lourdes files that do not meet the strict criteria laid down by the Vatican about 300 years ago. This is the problem the bishop is trying to address.
Vatican rules demand that the illness healed must have been incurable and that the healing is sudden, instantaneous, complete and without any subsequent relapse. A further demand lies at the root of the current problem. The miraculously healed person must not have had any medical treatment or taken any medicine that can be shown to have been effective.
”This means that it is impossible to recognise any cure of cancer,” said Perrier. ”It will be impossible to say in the end if the treatment had an effect or not.”
In recent years the Catholic Church has come under pressure from fast-growing evangelical churches that now count more than a third of a million worshippers. Critics say Lourdes is trying to use more miracles to catch up. The bishop said he had been inspired by two healings in the past 15 years that in his view were miraculous but were not recognised. — Guardian Unlimited Â