On February 11 the Church keeps the feast of Our Lady of Lourdes, commemorating the day in 1858 when the 14-year-old Bernadette Soubirous had her first vision of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Our Lady appeared to St Bernadette on 18 separate occasions over the following weeks, but it was during her ninth appearance, on February 25, that she told Bernadette to drink and wash herself.
At the time all Bernadette could see was a muddy puddle, but after some effort, she was able to scoop up enough clean water to drink. The following day a spring appeared in that spot. Since then, millions of pilgrims have come to bathe in the waters Bernadette discovered, and around 7,000 sick people have attributed their miraculous recoveries to the intercession of Our Lady of Lourdes.
Nevertheless many people remain sceptical and choose to adopt the view of the 18th-century philosopher David Hume, who argued that it is irrational to believe in miracles. Hume’s argument is based on the definition of a miracle as a violation of the laws of nature, where a law of nature is a regularity of past experience by which we can make predictions about the future. Since all our past experiences are in accord with these laws, Hume argued, then if someone should say a miracle had occurred, it is much more likely that they are mistaken or lying than that what they are saying is true.
But as it stands, Hume’s argument is very weak. For instance, there’s a story about a young reporter, Ruth Cranston, working in some remote parts of Asia in the early 20th century. When she showed villagers pictures of the New York skyline, they refused to believe it existed. It was only a picture, they said. If Hume were right, then it would have been irrational for the villagers to believe otherwise.
But an even more fundamental problem with Hume’s argument is how it defines what a miracle is. For if we decide that a miracle is a violation of the laws of nature then, as the Latin root violare suggests, it could seem that in performing a miracle God was treating His creation with violence and dishonour. Given this definition, it is therefore understandable why some people would want to reject belief in miracles. Such people wouldn’t necessarily deny the reality of extraordinary events such as the many healings at Lourdes, but rather than saying these events violated the laws of nature, they would say these events show us that there are laws of nature that we as yet do not understand.
For much of his life, this was the view of Dr Alexis Carrel. Carrel was brought up a Catholic, but he had long since abandoned his faith when in 1902 a former classmate of his asked him to take his place as the doctor in charge of a train carrying sick people to Lourdes. One of the passengers was a 22-year-old woman, Marie Bailly, who was suffering from tubercular peritonitis and was very near to death. They arrived in Lourdes on May 27. The next day she insisted on being carried down to the Grotto, despite the warnings of Carrel and the other doctors. Once at the Grotto, Marie was deemed too unwell to be allowed to be immersed in the baths, so she requested that some water from the baths be poured over her abdomen. Within half an hour many of her symptoms had disappeared and by May 30, when she left Lourdes, she was able to walk unaided. Carrel made detailed notes of what he witnessed at the Grotto describing it as “a sudden, a marvellous cure, a real resurrection”. Marie Bailly went on to make a full recovery; she entered a convent of the Daughters of Charity where she remained for the rest of her life, dying in 1937.
As for Carrel, he went on to lead a glittering career in medicine, winning the Nobel Prize for physiology in 1912. He did however struggle for many years to make sense of what he had witnessed at Lourdes and could only speculate that Marie Bailly’s cure must be attributed to some unknown force of nature. But in 1939, no doubt strengthened by the prayers of Marie Bailly, Carrel began seriously to consider a return to the faith of his childhood. He became good friends with a Catholic priest, Fr Alexis Presse, and in 1942, only a couple of years before his death, Carrel announced: “I believe in the existence of God, in the immortality of the soul, in Revelation, and in all the Catholic Church teaches.”
Among these teachings of the Catholic Church is that when God miraculously heals someone like Marie Bailly, it is not a violation of nature but a restoration of nature, and God brings about such miracles in order to strengthen our faith so that we may believe in the redeeming work of Jesus Christ.
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