According to Father Guillermo Cruz, advisor to this Hospitality, “a pilgrim who suffered from various illnesses and had severe visual impairment recovered her sight after making the water gesture,” adding that “this extraordinary event was promptly verified by the doctors and notified to the shrine, which has already registered it.”The fact will be analyzed in order to prove the miracle.
Newsroom(24/05/2024 13:25, Gaudium Press) During a pilgrimage to the Shrine of Lourdes in France, carried out by the Hospitality of Our Lady of Lourdes in Madrid, bringing together 800 participants, the apparent recovery of the sight of one of the pilgrims who suffered from severe visual impairment was reported.
However, for this event to qualify as a miracle, further studies are needed. As of 2018, no miracle has been officially recognized at the French shrine.
People also go to Lourdes to drink the water from the fountain and take it home with them. This custom began shortly after February 25, 1858, the day the Virgin Mary told Saint Bernadette where to dig to find the fountain. It is from this spring, which flows at the bottom of the Grotto on the left, that Our Lady invites us to “drink and wash there”.
Due to current sanitary conditions, it is no longer possible to bathe completely. However, hospital staff and volunteers welcome pilgrims to the bathing area and help them perform the “water gesture”, i.e. pouring water three times to wet their hands, face and take a sip. Just as Saint Bernadette did on Our Lady’s instructions.
According to Father Guillermo Cruz, advisor to this Hospitality, “a pilgrim who suffered from various illnesses and had severe visual impairment recovered her sight after making the water gesture,” adding that “this extraordinary event was promptly verified by the doctors and notified to the shrine, which has already registered it.”
However, Fr. Cruz is prudent and says that it is not yet possible to speak of a miracle, and is waiting for “a process of medical and spiritual discernment that must be followed”, in which “the following requirements regarding the cure must be met: Immediate, complete, lasting and inexplicable.”
A study must be carried out and, above all, the healing must be sustained over time.
Criteria for verifying a miracle
The doctor at the Bureau of Healing Constituencies receives people who wish to declare a healing. If he considers the case to be serious and worthy of further investigation, he will call together his fellow doctors and caregivers who are present in Lourdes that day and who have registered their presence at the shrine. If the doctors collectively decide to continue the investigation, the cure will then be subject to a long process of research, which could last several years, and at the end of which the members of the International Medical Committee of Lourdes (CMIL) will vote that the cure is “inexplicable in the current state of our knowledge”.
The bishop of the healed person’s place of residence is then informed of CMIL’s vote. It is then up to him, as the representative of the Church’s hierarchy, to take the decision to declare a miracle.
The first criterion for proving a miracle is that the illness be serious and with an unfavorable prognosis for cure.
Secondly, the illness must be known and registered by medicine.
Thirdly, the disease must be organic, lesional, in other words, there must be objective, biological, radiological criteria, everything that currently exists in medicine. This means that even today we will not recognize cures of pathologies without precise objective criteria, such as psychological, psychiatric, functional, nervous diseases, etc. (this does not mean that these diseases cannot be cured, but according to the Church’s criteria, they will not be recognized as miracles in the current state of things).
Fourthly, there must have been no treatment to which the cure could be attributed.
The 5th criterion concerns the moment of the healing itself: the recovery must be sudden, instantaneous, immediate and without convalescence.
Finally, after the cure, there are two additional criteria: it must not only be a regression of symptoms, but a return of all vital functions and, finally, it must not only be a remission, but a lasting and definitive cure. [1]
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[1] With information from the Shrine of Lourdes on the website Les miracles de Lourdes (lourdes-france.org).
Compiled by Teresa Joseph
