Four items about sainthood that have caught my attention during the month of July.
1. From America Magazine: Headline: "She prayed to Fulton Sheen and her baby was saved. Meet Bonnie Engstrom." The family is from Peoria, IL. A baby, apparently stillborn, surprised everyone by starting to breathe, but then was expected to die anyway because of oxygen deprivation, but didn't. It's a "Holy _______ please intercede for us" story with a social media twist. Sheen will be beatified soon (according to the article, the date hasn't been set yet). How this young family knows about Fulton Sheen isn't explained; maybe they watch EWTN. The article is in the form of an interview, and there is something about the mom that caused me to root for her.
2. From Chicago Catholic, the local archdiocesan newspaper: Headline: "Local woman's cure leads to Cardinal Newman canonization". It's another story involving a difficult childbirth and EWTN. The story of the suburban Chicago mom in question, Melissa Villalobos, and her baby is, if anything, even more dramatic than Bonnie Engstrom's. I found it quite easy to sympathize with her, if for no other reason than because of the impossibility of a pregnant mother of four being on bedrest for several months. Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman will be canonized on October 13, and this incident is the 2nd miracle in that cause.
3. This Tuesday, July 30th, is the memorial (feast day) for Blessed Solanus Casey. Casey was a Capuchin priest who spent much of his life in the Detroit Archdiocese. My brother and his family, who have a miraculous history with Blessed Solanus, about which I may write some day, were at his beatification mass a few years ago. If you need a saint (or, I guess, a Blessed) to pray to, he'd be the one I'd recommend.
4. Earlier this month, July 6, was the memorial for Maria Goretti. Coincidentally, July 6 also happens to be the feast day of St. Edna (St. Edina), who does not appear on the universal calendar of saints, but is the saint for whom my parish is named, and so for those of us who are parishioners (and who care about these things - I don't think there are many of us :-)), the patron of the local church supersedes a mere memorial like Maria Goretti's. So I don't celebrate Maria's day each year, at least as long as I'm a parishioner of St. Edna Parish. But I still think Maria is one to whom we should be turning. In my idiosyncratic private devotional way, I consider her, who was a victim of sexual abuse as a minor, to be a patron saint of minors who are victims of sexual abuse. I know that this is not the "angle" that was used by the church when it first proposed Maria Goretti to the faithful as a sort of heroic martyr to purity. Fortunately for me, I'm not old enough to have been subjected to that initial positioning. I consider that the abuse scandals shine a new light on her abuse and murder.
While I'm on the topic of Maria Goretti, I beg your leave to rant about something. The Franciscan Media site, in recounting her story, includes this passage: "On a hot afternoon in July, Maria was sitting at the top of the stairs of her house, mending a shirt. She was not quite 12 years old, but physically mature." That last little phrase frosts me. "Physically mature"? I've seen several accounts over the years that mention that. But why? Why was it thought necessary to include that dirty-old-man detail? She was an 11 year old who was killed while resisting her rapist, for cripes sake. Is there something about how she looked or how mature she was that somehow mitigates what happened to her? https://www.franciscanmedia.org/saint-maria-goretti/
Wow, impressive stories about the stillborn baby, and the woman with a tear in the placenta who was healed.
ReplyDeleteI have been following Bl. Solanus Casey's sainthood story for a while. An instance of God using someone whom his superiors didn't consider very talented to reach people. I hope you will share your brother's story of Bl. Solanus' intercession sometime.
About St. Maria, I agree, she was a child by anyone's definition, "physically mature" or not. Her emotional maturity was impressive, caring for her younger siblings because her mom had to work in the field. I'm quite sure that my younger siblings, when I was 11, could not have describes me as always kind and patient.
Even worse than the unnecessary mention of St. Maria's physical maturity is the mention in at least one account that her physical virginity was verified in the post mortem.
DeleteI didn't really do justice, in the original post, the impact that Melissa Villalobos's story had on me. Her story of being in a pool of blood, trying simultaneously to shield it from her children while hoping one of them will come to help her, and without her cell phone, panicked about the baby, maybe one part of her panicked about herself - to me, it just encapsulates the lonely desperation of a pregnancy with complications. I am not certain I walked that path with my wife as well as I could. I don't wish to absolve myself, but maybe nobody else can really walk it with the mom.
DeleteFulton Sheen always seemed saintly to me because he evidenced a living, enthusiastic faith capable of change and growth. Although he gave some anti-evolutionary talks in his TV series, he apparently became enamored with Teilhard later. I saw his remarkable talk on this rebroadcast on EWTN of all places. As Bishop of Rochester, he put forward social justice issues related to the local black community. Rochester was and still is, to a great extent, the optics center of the US. I think of it as the Jena of the US. I went there on business many times over the decades. In 1988, I went back to school at the University of Rochester. It had a vibrant Newman Club with an energetic nun giving Sunday homilies. Of course, the Great Squashing by JPII hadn't run full course yet. I wonder if this energy was somehow related to Fulton Sheen's tenure as bishop. Unfortunately, the Great Squashing finally reached Rochester. Ministers and members of the super progressive Corpus Christi parish broke away from the bishop to form the Spiritu Christi church which I believe still exists. It now is run by a woman priest. Sad. The separation, not the woman priest.
ReplyDeleteWhen your name is Tom you don't have to go looking for patron saints. As to Tom I, his other quote is at John 11:16, and nobody ever alludes to it. Tom II inspired the pilgrimage that inspired Chaucer and great plays by T. S. Eliot and Jean Anouilh. Tom III is still read, sometimes under duress, in the seminaries. And Tom IV was played in the movie by Paul Scofield, who can play me any time.
ReplyDeleteI re-read "Murder in the Cathedral" every December.
Tom, are you really allowed to have four? :-)
DeleteMy dad was always insistent that I was named for James the Lesser, not James the Greater. Why he insisted on this point, I am not entirely certain. Some years ago now when the news was full of the alleged discovery of an ossuary that supposedly housed the remains of "James the son of Joseph" or some such, I recall a biblical scholar writing that there are perhaps as many as five James's in the New Testament, most of which are identified with most of the others throughout history. I'll take 'em all!
One of my sons is named James. He informed me when he was about 10 that his patron was James the Greater. I was thinking about the Gospel reading where James and John and their mother, Salome, were petitioning the Lord about who would sit at his right hand in heaven. But I didn't say anything about that.
DeleteOne time on the feast of James the Greater, I emailed him this video of the famed botafumeiro at Santiago de Compostela in Spain. He replied, "craziness, Mom!"
Everyone who hasn't made the Long March of Catholicism ought, at least, to see the Botafumeiro in action. And study the response of Pope Benedict, who obviously expected to meet his patron saint at any moment:
Deletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXVZIv0kQGE
Tom, yes, the look on Pope Emeritus Benedict's face was apprehensive. I have read that the only time the rope has broken with the botafumeiro was in medieval times, and it flew out an upper window without hurting anyone. That in itself seems like a miracle.
DeleteI feel an urge to get in a plug for "Making Saints," written by Kenneth L Woodward when he was religion editor at Newsweek. He's still around; he had something in C'weal recently. The book as published in 1990, but it did well enough that there should be used copies around.
ReplyDeleteSome of the saints-under-discussion have been canonized since the book was written. But it's still a fascinating account of how canonization comes about. Pope John Paul II was pushing the saint-makers for more African saints. But most of the hospitals on that continent don't have all the equipment with bells and whistles and in-time records that we have in the developed world. And that made it harder to certify medical miracles. "Did they do a Mufscan Procedure?" "Well, no they are not equpped." "Well,Mount Sinai in New York would have done a Mufscan. How can we approve this without one?"
(Francis would have noticed, first, that there is a problem there bigger than certifying miracles.)
I have no major quibble with the church's official saint-making process, but I also don't believe we need to wait for the church to declare someone a saint in order to pray to them. If there is someone in the church who has inspired us, or whom we admire, I think it's ok to go ahead and pray to them.
DeleteAnd then there are the saints like Christopher or Philomena who may not actually have existed. What is one to make of prayers offered in good faith to them?
Jim, I am sure there are people in heaven named Christopher or Philomena. Seems like they would probably be glad to offer intercessory prayers for people who asked, even if *the* Christopher and Philomena do turn out to be just a story.
DeleteAgree with you that there are myriads of unsung saints, including some we have personally known, and that it's okay to pray to them.
For the first few hundred years, the bishops just looked around and saw their flock had declared someone a saint. I expect, on the basis of Mick Mulvaney's appearances, we will hear a cry of "Saint Donald John Subito" any day now.
DeleteSome other saints-in-the-making are in the news lately. One of them is Father Flannigan, of Boy's Town fame. He is a Servant of God, soon to be advanced to Venerable. It is said in this article that he warned the Irish church about abuse in the Irish industrial schools, and was "...viciously castigated by church and government for doing so." An item on a news site last week reminded us not to forget that Fr. Flannigan was aided in his efforts by Henry Monsky, a Jewish lawyer who provided both financial and legal aid at a time when Boys' Town was just a dream.
ReplyDeleteAnother saint in process is Servant of God Nicholas Black Elk, who would be the first North American saint to be beatified since Kateri Tekakwitha. If you were a high school student in the plains states, chances are you had to read excerpts from John Niehardt's "Black Elk Speaks", which is part biography and part poetry.
Interestingly, the Mass intention this morning was for the canonization of Bl. Stanley Rother; though the readings were for the memorial of St. Martha.
That should have read "...first Native American saint in the US to be beatified since Kateri Tekakwitha."
DeleteYeah, Katherine, I am with you folks on Bl. Stanley.
DeleteKatherine, thanks for that article about Nicholas Black Elk. I confess I had never heard of him before. Extremely interesting person!
DeleteI'm currently reading Robert Ellsberg's "A Living Gospel: Reading God's Story in Holy Lives." It's very good − but don't take my word for it:
ReplyDelete"Robert Ellsberg's A Living Gospel is the most meaningful work of hagiography I have ever read. He doesn't just describe saints; he takes us into their spirit and their spirituality. This book will stretch your idea of what it means to be holy in this day and age." − Joan Chittester
"A tremendous and compulsively readable book. One of the best books on the saints I've ever read." −
James Martin, SJ.
"In this beautiful book, Robert Ellsberg shares the gift of the saints- not unreachable, perfect people, floating in prayer, but real human beings who lived close to the ground, who sought to follow Jesus despite their own flaws, their crappy moods, their moments of doubt and disbelief; in other words, people like us. Robert's own life has been shaped by his encounters with such figures. Isn't that the way it is for all of us? We come to know Jesus through those who love him. And through their witness we find the courage to take one step, and then another, along his path of discipleship." − Sister Helen Prejean
"Drawing on a lifetime of reflection on saints and holy lives (including those he has known), Robert Ellsberg calls our attention to the deepest function of such stories: to help us recognize the patterns of grace in our own lives, and to respond more faithfully to our own call to holiness." − Richard Rohr
From the Villalobos story about Cardinal Newman:
ReplyDelete"Added to the stress was the fact that Villalobos’ husband, David, had to go back to work on Monday and to leave for an upcoming mandatory business trip out of town."
Whatever this story proves about Newman's holiness, it speaks volumes about the Dickensian nature of employment in this country: A man, because his job demands it, leaves his three very young children in the sole care of a wife who is not supposed to be out of bed due to an extreme medical condition without making a contingency plan.
It also points to a shocking lack of community: Were there no family, no neighbors, no fellow parishioners, no health care workers, no business associates who could be called on to help this woman?
Astounding.
Yes, you've articulated something that didn't sit right with me, either - except I was more apt to blame him than his employer. I'm sure you're right, though, about the pressures and insecurities that our employers put on us. I don't know how heroically I would have risen to that occasion, either.
DeleteIf something happened to me where I needed intensive monitoring, I don't know what we'd do, either. My wife needs to work. I guess we'd do what people do around here, and pay through the nose for some guy from Russia or Poland to live here with us.
"...the Dickensian nature of employment in this country"...yes. Case in point; my brother suffered a fall while trimming a tree (note: do NOT climb a ladder leaning against a tree, holding a chainsaw, unassisted). He ended up with bleeding on the brain and had to have emergency surgery. His daughter lives in another state and was worried sick. Her husband took time off work to drive her to be with her dad (who came through the surgery successfully). When the couple went back home, the husband had been terminated from his job. Employee protection is pretty light in Texas. Actually it is most places.
DeleteHow many of these miracles are supernatural? We'll never know. When I was a child I had a cardiac arrest during surgery. I attributed my full recovery without brain damage, even though without oxygen for a while, to the quick thinking and skill of my doctor. Small rural hospital in the 1950s - no paddles to restart hearts and no CPR - just cut my chest open and manually massaged the heart until it started beating again. My mother was warned that I might come out with serious brain damage. But I didn't. "Miraculously" I didn't. I felt it was the doc's willingness to do something he had seen done only once in his life - on a WWII battlefield by another doc - and his skill. My mother credited St. Therese of Lisieux since it happened on her feast day. I never saw lights or tunnels - or smelled roses, so I credit the doctor.
ReplyDeleteA niece with Type 1 diabetes went into a coma a couple of years ago. She lived alone. She did not go to work the next day, and nobody could reach her. When she didn't go in the day after, her boss went to her apt, looked in the window (ground floor apt) and saw her lying unconscious. Nobody knew how long she had been in that state. She was in intensive care for almost two weeks, in a coma. Her parents were told that she had been in the coma "too long" and that there was brain damage. They had done an MRI that they said showed the brain damage. Well she woke up. And went back to work about a week later. She recently won an award for her outstanding work (she works in biology/health research).
Miracles aren't needed to demonstrate someone's holiness and goodness. Their lives do that Just becoming a pope, or a priest, or a nun, does not mean someone is holy and should be called "saint". Being married and giving up marital sex also does not mean someone is a saint! Even being a good TV Catholic apologist, complete with dramatic flourishes of a cape, does not mean someone is holy or a saint. Lord help us, if being n effective media personality is all that it takes, the church will be rushing to canonize Barron a year after he dies.
Those who live in a way that inspires should be called saints. It does not matter if they are Catholic, nor are miracles needed to prove their holiness. God does not make favorites of people who happen to have christian friends who pray for them. He loves Hindus and Jews and Muslims and atheists also. The God I have met through the gospels is not a Trumpian God who dispenses favors to his best buddies -if they ask him nicely with sugar on top (aka a huge business deal, or maybe a huge campaign donation).
Honor those whose lives inspire, and don't worry about miracles. It's one thing I like about the Episcopal calendar of saints. They honor the traditional saints (Francis of Assisi etc) and also people like Martin Luther King, Dorothy Day, and Mahatma Ghandi. Imperfect people whose lives inspire. Some are not even christian. But they may be saints.
Anne, that story about your heart is remarkable, to say the least. While giving all due credit to your doctor (and I'd say he's due a helluva lot), I hope you don't mind if I give your guardian angel, and his, a supporting Oscar.
DeleteThanks for that explanation of the eruv - I had never heard of it before, and it gives a little window of insight into Judaism (I assume, Orthodox Judaism?).
You're right about suburban Catholic parishes being too big and impersonal to allow many parishioners to form the necessary community bonds. In my parents' and grandparents' day, those bonds were formed, not at the parish level per se, but at the level of extended family, ethnic networks, and neighborhoods. (Maybe we could add labor union locals to that list?) All those forms of social capital are much attenuated these days. Some Catholic parishes are seeking to intentionally cultivate smaller faith communities within the parish (Christian Family Movement is one such venture), but it's kind of a struggle for most parishes, I think.
Anne, in regard to the Episcopalian ecumenical calendar of saints, back when the "anonymous Christian" was a live concept (people who were Christian without knowing it), I heard Albert Camus nominated for the title, and I heard a response that stuck with me: "Camus had a chance to become Christian and chose not to. Making an 'honorary' Christian out of him is a form of colonialism." I think the Catholic practice of making saints in-house, so to speak, simply restricts the calendar to people who showed in their life that they had some interest in being on the Catholic calendar of saints.
DeleteVatican II's Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, made a point of calling out that Catholicism "is linked with" all the baptized, presumably including Dr. King, and also is "related in various ways" to non-Christian religions. In the latter section, it also states that "[t]hose also can attain to salvation who through no fault of their own do not know the Gospel of Christ or His Church, yet sincerely seek God and moved by grace strive by their deeds to do His will as it is known to them through the dictates of conscience"; whether Gandhi would be included in that description, I don't know. These insights, expanded upon and deepened by the same Council's Decree on Ecumenism, suggest that we can and should appreciate sanctity beyond the walls of the visible church.
Delete"...we can and should appreciate sanctity beyond the walls of the visible church." That had always been my understanding. I was glad to see the document, Lumen Gentium, cited, which expounded that teaching.
Delete"Lead, Kindly Light" was one of Gandhi's favorite songs, I am told.
DeleteJean: It also points to a shocking lack of community: Were there no family, no neighbors, no fellow parishioners, no health care workers, no business associates who could be called on to help this woman?
ReplyDeleteI have mentioned a number of times that we live in a community with a Jewish majority population. Our immediate neighbors are mostly conservative and reform. But, across the main road outside our neighborhood there is a neighborhood with many orthodox Jews, popular for Orthodox because it is walking distance to the Orthodox temple and is also an eruv. (see link below for an explanation of eruv). As it happens, my former RC parish is in that neighborhood and for several years our kids attended the same public school that the Orthodox Jewish neighborhood children attended. (we moved them to a Catholic private school when they each hit 4th grade). I became friendly with one of the other moms whose child and mine had become buddies. She called me one day to ask me to please call my parish. One of her neighbors, a Catholic, was in a very bad way, physically, serious heath problem, with no help with her kids or house or cooking, and the family on the edge of losing their house. Her husband had to go to work to keep the house and buy food and pay bills, leaving his nearly helpless wife alone to cope.
My Jewish friend and a couple of the other Jewish neighbors of this woman were helping the family as much as they could, but she was horrified that nobody from the parish had offered help of any kind. If a member of her Jewish congregation had been in a similar state, there would have been an army of people helping the family in difficulty. Her congregation was small, our parish had 4000 families, a paid staff of 20+ people, a gazillion volunteers for different parish programs, and 4 priests. But nobody offered to help this parish family that needed help.
The size of the parish (7 masses every weekend, with a church that seats 700 and several masses standing room only) made it so impersonal that it's very possible that nobody had even noticed her absence, or that her kids weren't going to CCD, and that they never saw her husband. I couldn't even begin to explain this to my Jewish friend. I had trouble understanding it myself.
So, no family nearby (VERY common in DC area - most who live here came here from other parts of the country, and, very often leave again after a few years - so no family, no friends of many years), some nice Jewish neighbors who were doing what they could, but couldn't be there all the time, and zip from her the family's parish. My friend, and her Catholic neighbor, lived less than 2 blocks away from the church. An easy walk.
Another of my Jewish friends helped found a website called My Jewish Learning. It's guide for Jews to understanding their own teachings and traditions, and I often turn to it when I come across some new aspect of Judaism - one that I am not already familiar with.
Eruv is explained at the following link.
https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/eruv/
What happened to the Catholic family?
DeleteSeems to me they got a miracle in the form of your Jewish friends.
Sorry, Jean. Just saw this. Yes, their miracle was their Jewish neighbors.
DeleteI called the parish and told them about the situation. I am (too late) ashamed that I didn't go their home personally - it was a busy time for me then, and I wasn't generous enough to give up some of my free time to help. I regret that.
The parish contacted one of the Catholic social agencies, and they did send some practical help. I checked with my Jewish friend who had first contacted me to make sure.
At the Episcopal church we go to (1/10th the size of the RC parish) there is a "Pastoral Care" committee. They swing into action whenever someone needs help - housekeeping, food, rides to doctors, childcare etc - all done by members of the church congregation.
My old RC parish had nothing like that, and from what I learned later, the help that came was from a Catholic Social Services agency, not from the parish.
My cousin's daughter is a Presbyterian minister. They have that type of thing. I have to have blood monitoring at the satellite hospital every other month. I should put an announcement in the bulletin that I can take three ride-alongs. My bad.
DeleteI might do that after my next oncology appointment, just in case frequency of testing changes.
I am a devout skeptic when it comes to miracle stories. I have read a number of accounts of the Engstrom/Sheen alleged miracle, and I was struck by this quote from the mother herself:
ReplyDelete“When James was born the midwife scooped him up and put him in my hands. But I noticed that his legs and arms dangled down. He wasn’t moving. He wasn’t breathing. He wasn’t crying, he was kind of a blue colour. So I held him for a second and then my midwife took him and she began CPR.”
This has little or no bearing on whether a miracle occurred, but I couldn't help asking myself what kind of midwife places a baby that is not breathing or moving into its mother's arms. Surely everyone who knows anything about delivering babies knows that the first step after delivery is to see that the baby is breathing.
Some people who believe in miracles see them happen all the time. People who don't believe in miracles hardly ever see them. What people see doesn't seem to have much effect, one way or the other, on miracles.
DeleteReminds me of Einstein who said that for some people nothing is a miracle, for others everything is. I would also say that anyone who accepts quantum mechanics believes in magic. That's becoming more apparent every day.
DeleteStanley, what is quantum mechanics, which I never understood, doing to us now?
DeleteTom, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle has been around forever. It actually has helped me get a preliminary grasp on things like laser function, fluorescence, nuclear decay. Of course, there's Shrödinger's cat which is supposed to be alive and dead until the box is opened. Lately, to get more weird, they have done experiments (no cats) showing that the emergence of the final state takes place over a finite amount of time. What's really weird is they can know the outcome and then change the experiment to shift to another state. In other words, they can save the kitty if it looks like he's coming out dead.
DeleteThen there's quantum entanglement via Bell's Theorem. If you measure one aspect of an entangled particle, the other entangled particle knows instantaneously, speed of light be damned, what was done to the other particle. Now that has gotten weirder. You can pass entanglement from one particle to another so that two particles that never met or dated are also entangled. These weird things may actually eventually have practical usage for encrypted messaging and quantum computers.
First the experimentalists proved the correctness of the science. Now they're going further into the twilight zone. Hope this helps though I doubt it. Makes me want to dig out some of the old physics books if I ever get time.
Oh, yes, I remember Schrodinger's cat. But that seemed like a Moebis (sp?) strip than a threat.
DeleteI tend to be skeptical about miracles. I would also be interested in what happens to those to whom miracles occur. How are they changed, inspired--or not--by their experience.
ReplyDeleteOne time in a homily on the raising of Lazarus the priest made the point that Lazarus' raising from the dead was for our benefit, not his. Because now he would have to go through dying all over again at some point. However there are some creepy legends that he still wanders the earth. Not being able to die would be a fate worse than death, I think.
DeleteIt is God's plan that we die away from this earthly plane, and, if we are lucky, we see it as a gift of release.
DeleteMy point is that when Divine Intervention seems to, well, intervene, what do people make of it? My hope is that the Villalobos aren't just talking about their good luck, but are actively doing for others what they believe Cardinal Newman did for them--strengthening the support system for other young families, raising questions about the workplace, talking about the way the Church needs to support life in many ways.
Tom, I suppose it depends on how people define "miracle".
DeleteLots of things happen that may not be explained by current knowledge. The numbers of "miracles" at Lourdes began to drop dramatically with advances in medical and scientific knowledge.
Creation - all of it - is a miracle. Being one of those often-belittled SBNRs who, in the cliché, hear God's voice more clearly in silence and in nature than they do in homilies in churches, I think that church people often miss the real miracles. Sunrises and sunsets. Everyone sees a miracle in a baby's smile, in the voice of a friend. (The formally religious do love to make fun of those who see and hear God in nature and a baby’s smile more easily than in church buildings) But not just in the beautiful places. God's love (THE miracle) is in the poor and suffering places also. I saw it when visiting the materially poorest place I've ever been to (third world conditions) with a small group of nurses from Spain, to dispense medicines, AND cookies to the children, and seeing one little girl split her cookie in half to give to a toddler who didn't get one A small miracle. I saw many miracles while visiting this poor area in the Caribbean – but none of those included physical healings.
Perhaps some (Jim?) don't think these count as miracles, just as some don’t believe that people can hear God's word outside of formal religious institutions. Step outside and look at those fireflies everyone here is always talking about and you will hear God in the silence, and see miracles. In the dark night sky – and in the fireflies that light it, along with the stars.
Although my mother attributed my recovery to an intercession by St.Therese (I had been given what was then called Extreme Unction), I do not think my recovery was due to intercession, The miracle was the doctor, a small town GP, and his personal courage in taking the risk of doing something he had never done, and had seen done only once, years earlier, on a battlefield. But, to please my mother, I did take Therese for a confirmation name.
Did Jesus not somewhere scold those who "need" miracles to believe?
It comforted my mother to believe that St. Therese was watching over me. I suppose it comforts all of those who claim they or a loved one experienced a "miracle" healing, rather than experienced a medical mystery. I was without oxygen to the brain for long enough to cause brain damage. But it didn't happen. My niece's MRI indicated brain damage but it didn't actually exist. Even modern medical technology is imperfect. MRIs have to be interpreted and those interpretations may differ when done by different radiologists.
JPII got rid of the Devil’s Advocate and reduced the number of required miracles to one. I’m sure he realized that most of the “miracles” are due to human skill, not to supernatural intercession. But people love the idea of “miracles” and he realized that too.
Why not thank God for the "miracle" of dedicated scientists, doctors, and nurses when these "miracles" occur?
But my biggest objection to "miracle" healings is that they are too often one of the scams perpetrated on suffering people who want to believe that if they pray enough, or go to a healing service at their church, or throw money at a televangelist, they will be healed. A woman I have known for 40 years has dedicated her life to becoming "healed" via one of the "healing" ministries out there. She's 74 now, and still isn’t “healed”. She’s evangelical protestant, so maybe her problem is that she hasn’t prayed to Fulton Sheen.
Why would God only intercede for those who happen to pray to Fulton Sheen or John Newman or St. Francis or any other person they think has God's ear. If this is true, then God does not love ALL of humanity, but only very few members of it (all Catholic, coincidentally). This idea does not paint a very nice picture of God's nature. Maybe not such a loving God after all.
Anne, I agree with what you said about "...Creation - all of it- is a miracle." I don't think it has to be either/or. One can see miracles in nature, and in relationships, and also see them in religious settings. I think God does love all humanity; "Our Lord's patience is directed towards salvation." Mostly I think God works through people, but occasionally lets us see a glimpse of things which lie beyond this world.
DeleteAnne, if you discern God's presence in our world in a baby's smile or a sunset, I'm certainly not going to tell you you're wrong.
Delete"The numbers of "miracles" at Lourdes began to drop dramatically with advances in medical and scientific knowledge."
ReplyDeleteYes, but they continued. A priest I know who is quite skeptical of miracles as reported says in the two summers he worked at Lourdes he saw things he never expects to be able to explain.
OK, two conventional miracles with one moral:
My wife's cardiologist goes to Africa for four to six weeks every year to operate pro bono. He goes under the auspices of a church group (to help convert Catholics into Christians, I suspect). Anyhow, here in Palm Beach County in 2000, in the ER, he watched a patient straightline and his lips turn black. He pronounced the patient dead. Then "God" told him to stick around. So he prayed. The ER doctor walked into the room, and he said "try the paddles one more time." Clear! Thump! And immediately the patient developed a normal heart rate. The doctor wrote a book about it, "Raising the Dead,"by Dr. Chauncy Crandall IV. Nurses tell me he has a terrific reputation as a heart surgeon. I've met him. He doesn't talk crazy.
I was working for an institution, and one of our top officials was facing serious surgery. We distributed his obit with a HOLD FOR RELEASE ON IT. The hospital called and said he was dead. His wife said he was dead. We released the obit. Then his wife called and said that as they were taking him to have his organs harvested, his eyelids flickered. They spun the gurney around and raced back to the OR where they started working on him again.We called back the obits, but one paper, in San Francisco, followed up and used the whole story as its lede the next day. He may still be alive. He said he never saw the bright light. In fact, he didn't remember anything about it.
Moral: Both of these non-deaths occurred in the operating room of major, highly respected hospitals. Both were called death by the usual scientific, medical sources -- the same sources that are called upon by people rejecting the Hand-of-God theory.
I dunno.
Nurses tell me he has a terrific reputation as a heart surgeon. I've met him. He doesn't talk crazy.
DeleteAnd Ben Carson has a terrific reputation as a brain surgeon. But would you believe everything he says? How about his own miracle? When his belt buckle stopped the bullet. Or the knife, or whatever it was.
I tend to discount the books (and the book deals) that doctors make after witnessing a "miracle" in the OR.
Tom, I actually have done a fair amount of reading on this subject, as well as into the "near-death" experiences, and my conclusion on the miracle cures after death is "medical error".
ReplyDeleteThe tunnel and the light and the euphoria of the near-death experiences have been pretty well explained by neuroscience. But I think that some are declared dead that aren't dead. I think that MRIs are misinterpreted. I think that all the technology is fallible. So, celebrate the miracle that one who was (at the minimum), almost dead isn't dead. But I don't really know if it is good for people to give them false hope that their loved one will be saved by a miracle provided by God as a favor to a person who has died, and to whom someone has prayed.
People want to believe in medical miracles, just as most want to believe in God, at least in a God who is love. Both beliefs give hope to people who face all kinds of struggles. Nobody is free of struggle, or pain (physical and/or emotional),or dealing with their own mortality. So, belief in miracle, or in God, or in heaven, helps people to deal with all the sadness and challenges - with the inescapable pain of being human.
So, right or wrong to give false hope? I have a friend who went to Lourdes twice with MS - once when he was still young, and again a few years ago. His father was a Knight of Malta, and a doctor, and took him to Lourdes the first time. The second time the local chapter of the Knights of Malta took him to Lourdes - he was totally wheelchair bound by then. He wasn't cured either time. Now he has only the use of one hand - pretty soon he will lose that. He is a devout, prayerful Catholic, but I'm not sure it was a kindness to encourage him to believe that he would experience a miracle cure of his terrible disease. A lot of the cures at Lourdes are easily explained by modern medicine, but people want to believe in the miracle.
Perhaps it would be cruel to deprive people of the hope for a miracle, even it it is a false hope. But when they aren't cured, and most aren't in spite of the millions of prayers for healing that are said every single day, one wonders if people will secretly begin to suspect that they are at fault, they are not worthy of a miracle.
As you said, I dunno.
Well, yes, Anne. But aren't you telling me that the convincing, reputable, scientific, no-nonsense medical profession makes so many mistakes that one would do almost as well, maybe better, relying on miracles? I mean, if you attribute all medical "miracles" to medical error, why couldn't someone else (not me) attribute all medical successes to miracles, rather than your notoriously mistake-prone medical science?
DeleteTom, LOL! Perhaps it is miraculous when all goes well.
DeleteAccording to a (2016) Johns Hopkins study, medical error is the third leading cause of death in the US, after heart disease and cancer.
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/study_suggests_medical_errors_now_third_leading_cause_of_death_in_the_us
My husband and I are old enough now to have experienced several instances of medical error, for ourselves, and for family, some of which have had quite serious, if not fatal, consequences.
I would rather not count on an intercession with God by a saint when in surgery, or seriously ill. But maybe skilled, conscientious, careful docs and nurses are the miracles we need.
Jean: I tend to be skeptical about miracles. I would also be interested in what happens to those to whom miracles occur. How are they changed, inspired--or not--by their experience.
ReplyDeleteGood question.
Ann wrote, "I saw it when visiting the materially poorest place I've ever been to (third world conditions) with a small group of nurses from Spain, to dispense medicines AND cookies to the children, and seeing one little girl split her cookie in half to give to a toddler who didn't get one. A small miracle."
ReplyDeleteThis reminds me of a story a churchworker here (El Salvador) told me. He frequently accompanied the Maryknoll sisters who were raped and murdered here in 1980. He said that one day when one of the sisters, Maura Clarke, was with a number of pastoral workers, someone walked up to her and gave her a coke, "served" in the way sodas are usually drunk here: in a plastic bag and with a straw. Instead of drinking it, Maura passed it around so that everyone in the group could have a sip, and then took the last sip herself.
I would much rather venerate Maura Clarke and the other martyrs than Fulton Sheen. Nothing against Sheen and those who like him, but he doesn't particularly resonate with me.
DeleteJim, You would probably like Sheen better if you were around back when a Catholic presidential candidate was as controversial as a gay candidate would be today.
DeleteSheen could be corny. Yes. He was up against Uncle Miltie Berle, remember. But he had his moments. Once he was signed up to preach a retreat to Jesuits.
He began: "To Hell with the Jesuits!"
That woke them up.
He continued: "To Hell with the Jesuits!"
There was now stirring in the pews, and fists were forming.
Sheen concluded his opening: "'To Hell with the Jesuits!' has been the battle cry of enemies of the Church for 500 years."
I can hear him saying that with his stentorian voice.
DeleteGene, I would support sainthood for the Maryknoll nuns. Absolutely. They performed plenty of miracles while alive. Is there a movement underway? I haven't checked.
DeleteI would even support it for Sister Luisa, the 'head" nun we traveled with in the DR. She and two other Spanish sisters who were nurses lived in the main town permanently, helping the 60,000 who lived in the small villages scattered throughout the mountains. They did a lot of basic health education, worked to get latrines and simple water filters into the villages (many, many children died before age 5 from dysentery due to the dirty water they drank), trained mid-wives etc, because they could only visit them once or twice a year in the more remote areas. It broke my heart to see the babies and children with big bellies, swollen with parasites from the water.
The others we traveled with to several tiny, remote, and very poor villages, were six 20-something nurses (three young men and three young women) who worked in hospitals in Spain that the sisters operate there. They themselves decided to gather meds and spend their 6 week vacations on healthcare work in the DR.
The sisters had a huge pick-up truck that could fit most of us (most of us riding in the open in the truckbed), and we could drive to some of the villages, up narrow, dirt, rock-strewn roads that climbed the mountains. To get to one village, we had to either hike up or ride a mule. I was so slow hiking up to the village they put me on a mule with a driver to go down. I was grateful for the surefooted mule and his experienced rider, as I sat clinging to him while the mule navigated the rough trail as I looked down at the river about 1000' below. I told myself that many people pay thousands of $$ for a similar adventure! I was about 50 then, the oldest in the group and out of shape. I came home, started daily 3 mile walks and lost 30 pounds. Too late to help me on mountain hikes though.
I'm sure that you are quite familiar with the conditions I encountered on that trip.
Tragically, a couple of years later, two of the Spanish nursing sisters had a fatal accident coming down the awful mountain road during a storm. The truck left the road, and they were killed. Sr Luisa was not with them, so she continued the permanent mission and eventually a couple of new sisters left Spain to work with her there.
As far as I'm concerned, those three sisters, and maybe even the six young lay nurses, are all deserving of "sainthood". Far more than most of those the church canonizes these days.
Random.warm-up thoughts:
ReplyDeleteI like to think it is possible to be a good Catholic and yet be skeptical and critical of the canonization process, which has and likely will continue to evolve, miracle stories, and hagiography
In the Middle Ages, saint-making was local, and (up side) gave people a friend in heaven who had also been a friend on earth. It also (down side) was monetized by the pilgrimage business and relics racket.
Hagiography, the granddaddy of the "branding narrative," has always been a mixed bag of sincere devotion and lily-gilding designed to jack up a saint's prestige and, by extension, the number of people willing to shuck out money on a pilgrimage.
Sadly, even today, people seem to see prayer as akin to buying a last chance lotto ticket. I think miracles have to amount to more than just God's favor on the recipient of the miracle (while everybody else in the same boat drowns). It has to confer some lesson from which we can all benefit.
warm-up s/b wrap-up
DeleteJean, yeah - I admit I'm not entirely sure what to make of the confluence of miracles and saint-making. I believe the two reports I cited in the original post - I believe that what those two women describe, really happened. If they say it's miraculous, I'm not enough of an anti-miracle zealot to dispute their accounts. I also don't think either woman signed up for the publicity (which I guess I contributed to, in the most modest way possible, with this post) that came along once their miracles got fed into the machinery of saint-making.
Delete"My child is dying" / "I'm dying" are situations that would prompt me to prayer, too. When those prayers, against the odds, are answered in a positive way, I suppose the chief thing is to be grateful. The apparatus of saint-making is sort of beside the point.
In the course of writing a homily a few months ago, I felt like I "connected" in some way to Jean Donovan, one of the American women martyrs in El Salvador. I can't explain it. But I feel it's a story that needs to be known. If that's part of saint-making, then that part of it seems good to me.
Not really going anywhere with this, just sharing some thoughts and reactions.
I don't doubt miracles occur, either, but the business around miracle requests has a toxic side. Priests and deacons, in my experience, try to temper this, but desperation is a powerful driver.
DeleteEx: One of our parishioners has an aggressive brain cancer with a low survival rate. A few months ago, she put out frantic calls for prayers, and told everyone to be "very specific. Don't just ask for healing but please mention ... " and she went on to describe tumor and treatment type she wanted to boost.
All I felt I could do was to pray God would take away this poor woman's terror.
Now she is near death. Did people like me fail her by not praying specifically enough?
Ex: I have never asked God to cure my cancer--it's incurable, nothing hurts, I'm just tired and will get more tired until I fade out sometime in the next 5-10 years. But I learned recently that Raber prays every Sunday for a cure. Now I pray for him to find acceptance and invest his energies in a less risky venture.
Which prayers will God answer? Or is God thinking, "Geez Louise, I can't do anything for you people until you get on the same page"?
Note that these examples all only a transactional kind of relationship with God: I pray, you deliver. Something about the idea of prayer as currency strikes me as wholly off base.
Re connecting: Walking with the saints or a favorite saint--knowing that that saint is with you in a real way--is a great gift in itself. If Jean Donovan has latched on to you, then a little part of you is already in heaven, and she will bring joy to your life.
Anne,
ReplyDeleteYou wrote, "I would support sainthood for the Maryknoll nuns. Absolutely. They performed plenty of miracles while alive."
They (Maura Clarke and Ita Ford) worked together with two other women: an Ursuline nun (Dorothy Kazel) and a lay missionary (Jean Donovan). There's an excellent documentary about Jean: "Roses in December." I strongly recommend it. The good news is that now you can see it, free, via the internet. There's a link to it on the website of the Romero Trust: http://www.romerotrust.org.uk/videos
You'll also find links (also free) to two excellent documentaries about Archbishop Romero: "Monseñor: The Last Journey of Oscar Romero" and "El Cielo Abierto." Again, the link is http://www.romerotrust.org.uk/videos
Hoping to interest you in "Roses in December," I'll include here a review of it that I wrote. There's no link for it on National Catholic Reporter's website, but Commonweal later reprinted it: https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/martyrs-el-salvador
National Catholic Reporter
August 27, 1982
“Roses in December” Document of Courage
By Gene Palumbo
“Remember?” said Ana Carrigan, to her co-producer, Bernard Stone. “Remember when we came back from those first interviews, and you said, ‘If we get to the end of this film, we’re going to be different people’?” He nodded, and they agreed he’d been right.
Their film, "Roses in December," is likely to change other people, as it did them. It tells the story of Jean Donovan, the lay missioner who, along with three nuns, was raped and killed by members of El Salvador’s security forces in December, 1980.
Carrigan and Stone, along with co-producer David Meyer, tell the story through a combination of interviews with Donovan’s family and friends, excerpts from her diary and letters and film clips from the United States and El Salvador.
Carrigan and Stone said that in the beginning they were constantly asked, “Why isn’t the film about the nuns?”
“They were extraordinary,” said Carrigan, “but in a way, being nuns categorized them. An audience could respond by saying, ‘they’re special, they’re different, that could never be me.’” There was, Carrigan and Stone felt, a greater chance that an audience might identify with Jean.
She was surely no Therese of Lisieux. In the film one of her friends from Cleveland recalls how “I used to get terrified before we’d go into a bar. Jean would say, ‘No problem.’ We’d walk up and there’d be a bouncer at the door. He’d say, ‘Can I see your I.D., please?’ Jean would open her wallet, hand him her MasterCard and say, ‘Does anyone you know under 21 carry one of these?’”
In late 1977 Donovan surprised everyone when she announced that she was going to El Salvador as a lay missionary, as part of a team from the Cleveland diocese. Her parents went out to buy a map “to find out where El Salvador was.” Jean’s brother, Mike, thought she was joking. A friend in Cleveland asked why she was going: “I said to her, ‘You’ve got a beautiful apartment, a car and a motorcycle, and a job that other people would love to have.’ But she said she needed more.”
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ReplyDeleteFrom the time she arrived in El Salvador in September, 1979, the words of her friend, Irish missionary Father Michael Crowley, began to be fulfilled: “If you stand with the poor, identify with them, feel their insecurity, their rejection, then you begin to understand in a new way.”
The first stage of Donovan’s new understanding was reflected in an early letter from El Salvador. “I can’t quite put my finger on it, but something inside me is different…. The social structure is much different here….It’s all so unfair.”
As for standing with the poor and feeling their insecurity, that was taken care of for her as the violence closed in. From her diary: “It’s unbelievable. People are being killed daily. We just found out that three people from one of our areas were taken, tortured and hacked to death.” Later her best friend in El Salvador was murdered outside her house.
The film has interviews with a wide range of people who tried to persuade her to leave El Salvador. They felt they simply hadn’t reached her. That may be right, and not so surprising. It brings to mind what Wilfrid Sheed said after reading the essays Albert Camus wrote during World War II: “Camus’s feeling seems to be that violence so alters one’s total experience that those outside it cannot give rational advice to those inside it. They would simply be talking about different things.”
Donovan was “inside it,” living out her daily life in the midst of an undeclared war, helping the parish priest to bury the mangled, dismembered bodies of the casualties of that war.
She had other reasons for staying. Those “reasons” were people, Salvadorans she knew who had chosen to stay on, even in the face of death threats. She told me she revered Archbishop Oscar Romero – threatened innumerable times before finally being killed – and she may well have had in mind a sermon he gave after the murder of a priest and four teenagers. The killers, he said, were hoping to terrorize the church into silence and inaction, “and if we should oblige them, they will have won. But I do not believe the murders of these five have been in vain. They have preceded us in the experience of the resurrection. We live by that power that even death cannot destroy. We honor them and our faith by living unafraid, in the knowledge that evil has no future.”
Donovan gave no complicated answers herself. Her letters and diary entries, her statements to friends, were simple. During her final visit to Ireland, Crowley asked her to speak to a group of teenagers. Says one of them in the film: “She said she knew there was a good chance that she would be killed when she went back. But she said, ‘I belong there. I have to go back.’”
“I came to see,” said Carrigan, speaking of Donovan and the three women she died with, “that the meaning of their lives was so rich that death was not ultimately important. Every single day, when they got up, they had to know that that day might be ‘it,’ the end, as it had been for so many of their friends and so many people all around them. But it was like the biblical saying, ‘Death, where is thy sting?’ It wasn’t a factor for them. If it had been, they could never have done what they did. They simply couldn’t have functioned.”
"Roses in December" gives us a sense of that richness of life which Donovan had discovered. She who had been willing to lose her life, had found it. This story of one woman’s “yes” may help us utter our own.
Thank you, Gene.
ReplyDeleteI have found the videos. Now I need to find some working earbuds - without closed captions, I sometimes have trouble following the narrative! So I will watch, plugged into my ipad once I find them.
The opening scene alone is enough to sicken one.
Fulton Sheen strutting around a stage with his flowing cape (my Mom watched him - I was fairy young and thought he looked like Count Dracula in his outfit) being canonized seems almost a travesty when compared to the truly christ-ian witness of the lives of these women. Martyrs. Why not just canonize the Catechism?
https://www.cnn.com/2015/02/06/opinion/schlumpf-catholic-women-martyrs/index.html