Purpose of Miracles

Several writers have expressed scepticism about a miraculous cure from back pain following routine surgery. The patient himself, who happens to be a deacon of the Catholic Church, attributes his cure to a picture of Cardinal Newman [BBC News 13 September 2010].

@mjrobbins asks Is God scraping the barrel for miracles? (Guardian 13 Sept 2010) and suggests that Vatican's latest miracle is evidence of a worrying decline in God's powers.

But clearly the purpose of this particular miracle is to allow Vatican to beatify a Cardinal whose own view of such professed miracles is expressed in the following passage from his first essay on Miracles:

"Much more inconclusive are those which are actually attended by a physical cause known or suspected to be adequate to their production. Some of those who were cured at the tomb of the Abbé Paris were at the time making use of the usual remedies; the person whose inflamed eye was relieved was, during his attendance at the sepulchre, under the care of an eminent oculist; another was cured of a lameness in the knee by the mere effort to kneel at the tomb. Arnobius challenges the Heathens to produce one of the pretended miracles of their gods performed without the application of some prescription." [Essays on Miracles]

Meanwhile, the miracle cure attributed to the late Pope John Paul II, for the purposes of his beatification, has run into some difficulties.

The inexplicable cure of a young French nun from Parkinson's disease ... seemed difficult for the Vatican to certify as a miracle. According to the Vatican's own rules, the medically inexplicable cure must be instantaneous, complete, and lasting. Some are arguing that the world will have to wait her entire lifetime to determine whether it was lasting, in case the symptoms return. In addition, doubts have been cast about whether she had Parkinson's to begin with [Miracle under scrutiny in John Paul beatification Independent, 29 March 2010].

Update: Pope Benedict XVI has now formally approved this miracle [BBC News 14 January 2011]. Obviously he had no choice. "Nuns can be very useful." [Jesus and Mo, 16 April 2007]

Finally, we may note that similar controversy surrounds the miracle attributed to Mother Teresa for the purposes of her beatification.

In 2002, the Vatican recognized as a miracle the healing of a tumor in the abdomen of an Indian woman, Monica Besra, after the application of a locket containing Mother Teresa's picture. Besra said that a beam of light emanated from the picture, curing the cancerous tumor. Critics — including some of Besra's medical staff and, initially, Besra's husband — insisted that conventional medical treatment had eradicated the tumor [Wikipedia: Mother Teresa].

Lacking the sophisticated theological thinking with which the Vatican is blessed, popular journalism tends to describe all cases of unexplained recovery as miraculous. For example, an elderly widower appears to have regained his sight after kissing a photograph of his late wife. (It's a miracle! Daily Mail 17 Feb 2011. Obituary notice November 2009.) 

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See also Gary Wills, Stealing Newman, NYR Blog, 16 September 2010

80-year-old Spanish cardinal Agustin Garcia Gasco Vicente, in Rome for the beatification of late pope John Paul II, died of a heart attack on Sunday shortly before the start of the ceremony. [News24 1 May 2011]. Doesn't that cancel out one of the miracles?