The Christian has no problems with miracles. He believes in them not least because, on a different plane to belief and faith, he can add the philosophical argument that they are not, as C.S. Lewis puts it, "intrinsically improbable". Above all, the Christian believes in the greatest miracle of all, the Incarnation. If he has a problem it is the pain that comes when more are not performed in answer to prayer, the pain that calls on us to unite it with the Cross if, paradoxically, we wish to be relieved of suffering to a lesser or greater degree.
Those who do not believe in miracles cannot believe in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, still less his claim to be the Son of God; and if they disbelieve his claim, they will be similarly unbelieving, in his Resurrection and Ascension; as to walking on water, or leaving his new state in the species of bread and wine to become a daily miracle, tell it to the marines. Nor can they sensibly and honestly believe in God, because His creation teems with daily miracles.
If we believe in Jesus Christ, I think we would be tempted to lose our belief in him if he did not perform miracles, by which I do not mean grandstanding magic. The latter is for magicians and their ability to create illusions that we perceive to be realities even as we know that they cannot be. That woman is not really being sawed but that is what we see being done to her. Seeing, let alone not seeing, is not believing and blessed are those who do not see and believe; not my words, incidentally.
If we believe in Jesus Christ we believe in miracles because he performed them throughout his ministry. He turned water into wine, multiplied loaves and fish, called forth Lazarus from the dead, walked on water, caused the blind to see, the deaf to hear, the lame to walk. Finally, in a gesture that created Christianity because the apostles preached it before the Gospels were ever written, he rose from the dead and appeared to his followers in groups of various sizes, in different places in a form that was not always immediately recognisable.
The two disciples walking with him to Emmaus identified him only when he broke bread. Peter acknowledged him only after the repetition of the miracle of the full nets. Mary Magdalen thought she was speaking to the gardener when she saw the Lord. It was not until he spoke, "Mary", that she realised who he was. "Master."
The Christian believes in a God who is not mere indeterminate spirit but somebody who set the universe in motion. "Where wast thou," God asks Job, "when I laid the foundations of the Earth... Who hath laid the measures thereof if thou knowest?... or who laid the cornerstone thereof, when the morning stars praised me together, and all the Sons of God made a joyful melody...?"
And once He did, once He had written the laws of its existence, of our existence, why then, He can just as surely, by whatever means He chooses, refashion those laws or, if you prefer, restore them (for example, by impeding, turning round processes that are set in motion by illness). All of nature is subject to his will. He can perform miracles because all creation is His, by whatever means He chooses.
This includes the probability of miracles wrought through intercessionaries. To name but a few, Our Lady, St Francis of Assisi, St Catherine of Siena, St Thomas Moore, St Therese of Lisieux, St Anthony of Padua, Padre Pio and latterly Dun Gorg Preca, whose canonisation is taking place this morning within the reassuring arms of Bernini's colonnades outside the basilica of St Peter's. Yesterday evening Archbishop Paul Cremona led prayers in the 'Pope's church' of S. Maria Maggiore and tomorrow he will celebrate a Thanksgiving Mass at St Peter's itself.
A shoelace and a glove - ugh!
In 1964, Charles Zammit Endrich, who suffered from a detached retina and was about to go blind, suddenly recovered. A shoelace belonging to Dun Gorg had been placed under his pillow and prayers invoking the priest for his intercession offered. The ophthalmologist Dr Censu Tabone could volunteer no scientific explanation for the man's recovery at the time, and can volunteer none four decades later.
Six years go, a child recovered from what a surgeon at King's College Hospital, the world's most expert paediatric liver centre, described as "devastating" liver failure. The child's family prayed to Dun Gorg and a glove used during the exhumation of the priest was placed on the infant's body. "Scientifically," Professor Anil Dhawan, a Hindu, said, "I do not have an explanation for this child's recovery."
In neither case can the charge of hallucination, or hysteria, still less illusion, never mind delusion, those much-loved 'explanations' of miracles by cynics, reasonably be made.
A shoelace, a glove. Non-believers may dismiss both and leave it at that. Other non-believers sneer, write snide remarks, pour scorn on the story, yet they cannot explain what happened except in the unphilosophical sense that a miracle could not have taken place because, they say, miracles do not occur. Not everything that is inexplicable in matters of science is miraculous, they say. No, but perhaps just once they can tell us what reversed a condition that was life-threatening in one case, sense-threatening in another. They say it cannot be a miracle; therefore it cannot be a miracle.
One does not mind that so much. What is irritating is that they cannot let it go at that. They pooh-pooh what they cannot explain, scoff it out of existence on their authority, find it hugely low-brow don't you know? There are three kinds of Catholics: those who practise their faith, those who do not; and, among the latter, those who treat the religion, and all its stands for, with contempt. In parenthesis, an atheist was recently reported as passing on more than Lm12 million towards Catholic education. A retired hedge fund manager, he said that he had done so because "let's face it, without the Roman Catholic Church, there would be no western civilisation". If only our European leaders would agree with him.
At first sight, of course, neither a shoelace nor a glove is the stuff of holy or poetic glamour. Only the ignorant and the superstitious, it is asserted, would subscribe healing powers to such prosaic objects. And, of course, in themselves and of themselves, they are not conduits of grace that could reverse "devastating" damage in the child's liver, or re-attach a retina.
On the other hand, those who matter, the two persons involved, an adult in one case and an uncomprehending child (of anguished parents) in another, see things far more clearly. I was restored my sight one said, wasn't I? And the answer is yes. He was saved from an early death, say the parents of the child, wasn't he? And again the answer is yes. And we prayed to Dun Gorg, didn't we? Yes. So let us return to that unlikely shoelace and that improbable glove.
We read arguably about less edifying materials used by Jesus, like spittle mixed in dust to provide some form of clay. That "clay" was given the properties to cure. Jesus could have directly commanded those eyes to open. He had done so with the dumb man. Epheta! - and the man began to speak. On some occasions he chose not to adopt this approach.
A woman reaches out to touch the hem of his garment and was healed. Here, as in the case of that glove and that shoelace, which seem to have so upset some, we are witnessing an act of faith. We do not need to balk at the idea that in the same way as dust and spittle were vessels used by Jesus to cure the blind man, so were those outwardly improbable items used by God to make known Dun Gorg's sanctity? Disprove it, for once, those who demand proof of God's existence, but provide none when we ask them to prove his non-existence. Go on, read up Richard Dawkins.
San Gorg ta' Malta
The status of formal sainthood belongs to those who lead what used to be called heroic lives. There are many millions more of these than the saints the Church declares; millions who did nothing spectacular in their lives except live it, or tried to live it, in a coherent, Christian manner, which I suppose is spectacular enough. It is this that led Pope John Paul to re-form our ideas about sainthood.
We are all potential saints, he encouraged us to believe, even if our lives are far less heroic than those of Ignatius of Loyola, Francis of Assisi, Catherine of Siena, Anthony of Padua, Margaret of Antioch and a splendid roll-call of others, who now include San Gorg ta' Malta.
One hundred years ago, Dun Gorg embarked on what has developed into a prophetic catechetical mission. Some feared the institution he wished to set up could, or worse would, turn into a form of rival organisation to the Church. Its members were called on to keep their hair cropped, go around without a tie and, health addicts will be pleased to hear, not to smoke.
It was a rough passage for Dun Gorg and the society that would come to be known as tal-Muzew. This would not be formally recognised until 1932, when Dun Gorg was in his early fifties. Twenty-five years battling for recognition says something about the staying power of this extraordinary man, his belief in the righteousness of what he was doing, his ability to be self-effacing, his dogged determination to struggle for the recognition of his laymen and laywomen at a time when this grouping was as unlikely as that shoelace and glove.
Its members were often regarded with some disdain by many of those who were seemingly better educated, better heeled. Indeed, there was a time when to refer to somebody as if he or she belonged to tal-Muzew was pejorative in meaning and in intent. The achievement of the founder and the society was, precisely, to survive both that prejudice and the official concern. As its methods of evangelisation improved, in style and content, the society became an important source of catechetical instruction. It has been formally recognised as a society in Britain and, I read, has more than a thousand members scattered around the world. Its relevance is obvious. One assumes that Archbishop Cremona and Mgr Charles Cordina, the Pastoral Secretary of the diocese, will take on board the positive energies of the society in the service of doctrine and the Gospel.
I wonder, for example, how many copies of the Catechism of the Catholic Church commissioned by Pope John Paul II have been sold in Malta, how many priests, nuns, seminarians and teachers of religious education in Church, state and independent schools use it, how many members of the media, male and female, know of its existence. It has been around since 1992.
In Gospel - Catechesis - Catechism - Sidelights on the Catechism of the Catholic Church, Cardinal Ratzinger as he then was, remarks: "For while it is certainly neither possible nor desirable to live by prohibitions and accusations, the question about our duties as human beings, about the kind of life required for the rectitude of our own being and the being of the world, is the essential question of every age. And precisely the men of our time, who face so many catastrophes and menaces, yet are also in search of real hope, experience it with renewed passion as the fundamental question that concerns each and every one of us."
And in his introduction to the Catechism, Pope John Paul called on "all the Church's Pastors and the Christian faithful to receive this catechism in a spirit of communion and to use it assiduously in fulfilling their mission of proclaiming the faith and calling people to the Gospel Life". This is what San Gorg Preca attempted to do in his time - without the benefit of this particular work. He reminded people, uncomfortably, of the Last Four Things (never happy reminders but, equally, never untimely) and the good, this aspect is often ignored, the contentment that comes from a mature joyousness. In a different context to today's, he tried to answer "the question about our duties as human beings, abut the kind of life required for the rectitude of our own being and the being of the world..."
If I may come full circle, the real miracle of San Gorg Preca will become visible to all if his canonisation energises today's Church leaders, religious and lay, into the commitment undertaken by that simple soul one hundred years ago, in a lifelong attempt to bring the Good News to the unlearned; and to us who still have to grapple, alongside Nicodemus, with the paradox that unless we become like little children...
The real miracle has to do with more than a shoelace and a glove. To concentrate on those and miss out on the effects of that miracle is to miss out on a part of God's story. The real miracle will be if what he stood for continues to inspire the society that has now inherited him in a more special manner - and starts to inspire the society we live in today. His canonisation comes at an appropriate time.
Quote...
An 'impersonal God' - well and good. A subjective God of beauty, truth and goodness, inside our own heads - better still. A formless life-force surging through us, a vast power which we can tap - best of all. But God Himself, alive, pulling at the other end of the cord, perhaps approaching us at infinite speed, the hunter, king, husband - that is quite another matter. There comes a moment when the children who have been playing at burglars hush suddenly: was that a real footstep in the hall? There comes a moment when people who have been dabbling in religion ('Man's search for God!') suddenly draw back. Supposing we really found Him. We never meant it to come to that! Worse still, supposing He had found us?
So it is a sort of Rubicon. One goes across; or not. But if one does, there is no manner of security against miracles. One may be in for anything. (Miracles by C.S. Lewis)