What a crock!
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No healings rush seen with Lourdes "miracle lite"
By Tom Heneghan, Religion EditorThu Mar 16, 12:26 PM ET
The Roman Catholic pilgrimage shrine at Lourdes will not start churning
out cases of divine healings with a new category of faith-based
recoveries that do not qualify as miracles, its local bishop said on
Thursday.
Bishop Jacques Perrier said last week that Catholicism's leading shrine
was considering a new category of healings because modern medicine no
longer declares diseases incurable -- a key requirement for a recovery
to be declared miraculous.
The new category of "credible testimony" -- dubbed "miracle lite" by
critics skeptical about healings at the popular shrine in southwestern
France -- will still require doctors to certify a recovery from serious
illness was sudden and inexplicable.
Bishop Jacques Perrier said Lourdes, where dozens of people claim to be
cured each year after visiting a grotto where the Virgin Mary was said
to have appeared in 1858, would probably recognize only a handful of
certified healings annually.
"I'd say the average would be about five, something in that order -- it
won't be 50," he told journalists in Paris.
The Catholic Church teaches that God sometimes performs miracles
including cures doctors cannot explain. Skeptics reject this as
unscientific and explain sudden recoveries as psychological phenomena or
the delayed result of treatment.
The Church's 18th-century rules on miracles require doctors to attest
the ailment could not be remedied otherwise. A local medical bureau and
a 25-member medical commission receive many applications for recognition
and reject almost all of them.
Lourdes has declared only 67 healings as miraculous since 1858, despite
thousands of declarations from pilgrims who left Lourdes freed of their
ailments, Perrier said.
"NOT HUNGRY FOR MIRACLES"
Dr Francois-Bernard Michel, co-chairman with Perrier of the Lourdes
International Medical Committee that examines healing claims, said
medical progress had reduced the Lourdes pilgrimage from a voyage of
faith to a yes-or-no question.
"Medicine has progressed more in the past 30 years than in the 300 years
before that," said Michel, who is also a professor at Montpellier
University medical school.
"Because of the strict rules (for miracles), we have ended up with a
very simplistic alternative -- is it a miracle or not? But we doctors
are not hungry for miracles. We're not trying to find miracles where
there are none or offer discount miracles.
"We must respect both scientific rigor and the faith and conviction of
people who, at a precise point in their lives, have experienced a
radical change in their health," he said.
Perrier said the new category would not be a second-class miracle but a
new way of looking at unexplained recoveries.
"We want to redirect the spotlight," he said. "Now it is on the medical
case alone. We want to reorient it to the people involved. Their lives
were ruined and now they're well again.
"This takes the whole person into account, not just the isolated medical
aspect of the case."
Michel said the International Medical Committee concluded last November
that a French woman stricken by malignant lymphoma and leukemia had
experienced an "exceptional healing" after visiting Catholicism's
leading shrine.
The case of the woman, who has requested anonymity, has not yet received
approval as a miracle from the Church, he said.
Perrier said he would discuss his plan with the Vatican but that it did
not need approval from Rome to be introduced.
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http://tinyurl.com/g7sar
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John Hachmann aa #1782
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities"
-Voltaire
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