A new effort to introduce a three-tier classification of Lourdes miracles will shortly be put to the test, writes Lara Marlowe
In the 148 years since a 14-year-old shepherdess named Bernadette Soubirous said she saw the Virgin in a grotto, 7,000 people claim to have been healed at Lourdes. Sixty-seven of these healings were recognised by the Catholic Church as miracles.
So it was strange to hear Mgr Jacques Perrier, Bishop of Tarbes and Lourdes, say in a telephone interview: "The word miracle is rotten!" As co-president of the International Medical Committee of Lourdes (CMIL), which makes recommendations to bishops on the veracity of healings, Mgr Perrier is overseeing a small revolution in the church's attitude towards miracles.
A new, three-tier system of classification - declared healings, confirmed healings and healings for which there is no medical explanation at present - was announced six months ago and will be tested for the first time at the CMIL's annual conclave in November.
If two-thirds of the doctors' committee decide that the case of a 50-year-old Frenchwoman, cured 13 years ago of malignant lymphoma and leukaemia, cannot be explained by medical science, the bishop of Nantes will have to decide whether her recovery was due to divine intervention.
The very word miracle "orients the average French person in the wrong direction", Mgr Perrier explains. "A word that was originally religious has become totally profane. People talk about sporting miracles, economic miracles." The French word miraculé, which translates as "a person who has been cured by a miracle" inspires particular disdain in the bishop. "I condemn, I detest the expression miraculé," he says. "There are no miraculés; this is for the tabloid press."
The Gospel speaks of people healed, not of miraculés, Mgr Perrier adds. "This vocabulary is completely devalued. There are essential words in the Gospel which we must keep: Christ, salvation, the cross . . . But words that are secondary and have been completely perverted - like 'miracle' - we must not hang on to them."
Mgr Perrier says French media, under the influence of left-wing Catholics at the magazine Golias, have totally misunderstood his reclassification of miracles. "These people see self-interest everywhere," he explains. "It has nothing to do with evangelicals. It is due to the evolution of medicine, not theology."
Christian Terras, the editor of Golias, recently told Libération newspaper that Lourdes relaxed criteria for miracles in the hope of competing with evangelical sects who are far more profligate with their miracles.
Mgr Perrier says the evangelicals' "miracles" are dangerous. "An Indian priest who was touring Europe came to Lourdes," he recalls. "He told a person he was healed, and the man believed him for two or three months. His condition wasn't even stabilised. Afterwards, his despair was tragic. Perhaps we have too many guarantees, but they have none at all."
Seven of the official miraculous healings at Lourdes occurred in the first year of the shrine, 40 took place before the first World War and only five in the past 30 years. "It was very simple 150 years ago," Mgr Perrier says. "Diseases were curable or incurable, fatal or not. In no field of research are scientists now so categorical. They say: 'It is highly probable that . . .' We must stop asking doctors what we asked them unfairly for 150 years - to make scientific judgment on religious phenomena."
TWO FACTORS HAVE brought the church to an "impasse" in adjudging miracles, Mgr Perrier says: "First of all, the reliability of the diagnosis. Are we sure the person really had a specific disease? Second, everyone who comes to Lourdes has already undergone treatment." Among the criteria established by the church for miracles in the 18th century is the proviso that the diseased person must not have received any medication.
Prof François-Bernard Michel, a specialist in respiratory disease who co-presides the CMIL with Mgr Perrier, says some of the early miracles at Lourdes "could probably be eliminated today".
Prof Michel is a member of the French academy of medicine. When he became co-president of the CMIL last spring, his demand for greater clarity in the decades-old debate led to the new classifications.
"I don't run after miracles," Prof Michel says. "I don't need miracles to believe in God. I think faith based on miracles would be a poor faith, like the story of the Turin shroud." He does however believe that Lourdes is "a tangency point between heaven and earth".
"It will take a few years for the bishops to understand the freedom and responsibility conferred upon them (by the new classification system)," Mgr Perrier says.
He and Prof Michel wanted to escape from the "binary" system where healings were either miracles or not miracles.
The more than six million believers who make the pilgrimage to Lourdes every year "know nothing at all" about the debate over the classification of miracles, Mgr Perrier adds, predicting it will take 50 years for the more nuanced approach to be understood.