Denver, Colo., Dec 15, 2017 / 03:32 am (CNA).- What do a grilled cheese sandwich and the tilma of Our Lady of Guadalupe have in common?
Both bore what appeared to be images of Mary. One was determined to be authentically miraculous, the other was not. Not to spoil any secrets, but it’s not Our Lady of the Grilled Cheese that converted Mexico and continues to draw millions of people on pilgrimage every year.
But have you ever wondered just how the Church determines the bogus from the divinely appointed?
In his book, “Exploring the Miraculous,” Michael O’Neill gives readers a crash course of sorts in “Miracles 101” – including common questions about the importance of miracles, an explanation of the approval process, and descriptions of the various types of miracles found within the Catholic Church.
“This is a very rare book in that it tries to cover the entire spectrum of miracles within the Catholic Church,” O’Neill told CNA.
Catholics by definition are people who have to believe in at least two miracles, O’Neill said – that of Christ’s incarnation and his resurrection, two pillars on which the Catholic faith rests.
For modern-day miracles, belief is never required of the faithful. The highest recognition that the Church gives to an alleged miracle is that it is “worthy of belief.” Investigations of reported miraculous events – which include extensive fact-finding, psychological examination and theological evaluation – may result in a rejection if the event is determined to be fraudulent or lacking in super natural character.
Or the Church may take a middle road, declaring that there is nothing contrary to the faith in a supposed apparition, without making a determination on whether a supernatural character is present.
But while official investigations can take years, the mere report of a miracle can bring Catholics from long distances, hoping to see some glimpse of the divine reaching into the human.
And it’s not just the faithful who find miracles fascinating.
“It’s important for atheists and skeptics, those people who don’t believe, they’ve got to have an explanation for the inexplicable,” he said. “There’s something for everyone.”
The universal nature of the experience of the miraculous is also what draws people from all belief spectrums to these stories, O’Neill added.
“We all pray for miracles of one sort or another. They can be these really sort of small things like praying for an impossible comeback in a football game, or it can be a lost wallet or wedding ring,” he said.
“But they can also be these really big things, such as our loved ones, they fall away from the faith and we want them to return, or somebody from our friends or our family is very sick and we desperately implore God’s help for them. It’s something that everybody experiences.”
O’Neills own fascination with miracles started in college, when for an archeology assignment he studied the miraculous tilma of Our Lady of Guadalupe, a Marian apparition to which he’d inherited his mother’s devotion. He had heard stories about miracles associated with the image, both from within his own family and from the larger Church, and he wondered how much truth there was to the tales.
He also started learning about the larger tradition of miracles within the Church, and was struck by how the Church has carefully investigated thousands of claims over the years, only to select certain ones that it eventually deems as of divine origin.
“I thought that was fascinating that the Church would stick its neck out and say these things are worthy of belief,” he said.
Although he continued his engineering studies throughout college, a piece of advice at graduation from Condoleezza Rice, who was serving as vice provost at Stanford University at the time, stayed with him.
“She asked what we were going to do after graduation, and her advice was to become an expert in something,” he said.
“And I thought about what would be a great thing to study? My mind went back to all those hours I’d spent in the library and my promise to return to it someday and I said you know what? I want to be the expert on miracles.”
For a while he kept his studies private – he didn’t want to be seen as the guy who was obsessed with weird things like Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster. But eventually, he realized that many people were interested in miracles and found them helpful for their own faith.
“It’s a way that people feel connected to God, they know that God is a loving father watching out for them, so it’s one of those things – a miracle is a universal touchstone,” he said.
“No matter how strong we think our faith is or want it to be, we always want to know that God is there for us, and miracles are that sort of element that bridges the gap between our faith and our connection with God.”
In his book, O’Neill provides descriptions and examples of every basic category of miracle within the Catholic Church, including healing miracles from saints in the canonization process, biblical miracles, apparitions, locutions (audible messages from God or a saint), miraculous images, Eucharistic miracles, incorrupt bodies (those that either partially or fully do not decompose after death), and stigmata (the wounds of Christ appearing on some living people).
The most popular kind of miracle, and O’Neill’s personal favorite, are Marian apparitions – when Mary appears in a supernatural and corporeal way to a member of the faithful, most often with a message.
There have been about 2,500 claims of Marian apparitions throughout history, and a major one that many people are currently curious about are the alleged apparitions happening at Medjugorje, about which the Church has yet to make a definitive decision of validity. Curiosity about Marian apparitions was also a large part of what spurred O’Neill to create his website, miraclehunter.com, where he files information about miracles in their respective categories and provides information on their origin story and whether or not they have been approved by the Vatican.
“The Vatican didn’t have a resource where you can find out what’s approved and what’s not, and what messages are good for our faith and what ones we should stay away from, so I tried to create a resource for the faithful for that,” he said. He’s now been running the website for more than 15 years.
O’Neill also loves Eucharistic miracles, because unlike several other types of miracles, whose validity are largely determined by faithful and reliable witnesses, science can be applied.
“They can check to see if it’s really human blood, and what type of blood, and in some cases you have heart muscle in these hosts that have turned into true flesh,” he said.
One of O’Neill’s favorite Eucharistic miracles occurred in Argentina while Pope Francis was still a bishop there.
It was August of 1996, and a priest in Buenos Aires, Fr. Alejandro Pezet, discovered a host in the back of his church, and so he took it and placed it in some water in the tabernacle to dissolve it. Over the next few days, days he kept an eye on it, and it grew increasingly red. The priest decided to present the case to Archbishop Jorge Bergoglio, who ordered that the host be professionally photographed and eventually examined by a scientist in the U.S., who was not told the origin of the specimen he was testing.
The tests showed the sample to be heart muscle with blood type AB, the same blood type found on the Shroud of Turin.
“The scientist was an atheist and he said, why did you send me this heart muscle, what was the point of this? And they said it was a consecrated host, and actually that atheist scientist converted to Catholicism as a result of that study,” O’Neill said.
O’Neill also notes in his book that when considering miracles, it’s important to not go to extremes.
“The question of the role of miracles in our life of faith is an important one and requires avoiding two extremes: an overemphasis and credulity regarding the supernatural on the one hand and a denial of the possibility of divine intervention and a diminishment of the role of popular devotion on the other,” he wrote. Either way, obedience to the magisterium of the Church and their teachings on particular miracles is key.
Miracles are an important asset for the faith because of their ability to connect people with God, either as first-time believers or as long-time faithful who need a reminder of God’s presence.
“I like to think of miracles as a great way to engage young people, to get them excited about the faith,” he said. “They shouldn’t be the centrality of anybody’s faith, but it’s a way to open the door for people…so I think miracles can play a huge role in evangelization.”
This article was originally published on CNA May 8, 2016.
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How about in Los Angeles where a couple days ago an ex-boyfriend shot and killed his ex-girlfriend in cold blood in a driveway right in front of her three year-old daughter? He doesn’t deserve the death penalty for snuffing out that woman’s life and scarring that little girl forever besides depriving her of her mother? Get real. Executing murderers shows respect for life: for the lives of innocent victims snuffed out by the criminals. Not to execute such murderers is to disrespect life.
From an Old Testament and Pauline perspective, the death penalty is admissible. But ´in the light of the Gospel´, it is not.
https://press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/en/bollettino/pubblico/2018/08/02/180802a.html
https://press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/en/bollettino/pubblico/2018/08/02/180802b.html
See my two comments toward the bottom of https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2020/10/07/three-questions-for-catholic-opponents-of-capital-punishment/ – due to other preoccupations, it will take much more time to respond to the points raised in that article.
Update on this: the perp killed himself while being chased by police in Texas. Saved our society the trouble of a trial and executing him. He should have just offed himself before killing his ex girlfriend. Oh, he was a member of MS-13 gang too. Nope, some people forfeit their right to life.
[“The government is us, in the end. And we’re responsible,” he said of the executions.]
Infallibility is not given to bishops for judgments of particulars and on this point he is wrong. (As he is wrong on capital punishment.)
Agree.
Somewhere in his earlier and voluminous writings, the theologian von Balthasar observed that the death penalty is partly an expression of belief in eternity. That things don’t end here. That no one is extinguished. To see with lesser eyes is to settle for a flat universe with no redemption or salvation beyond history and the curvature of the earth.
Without pretending to parse “inadmissible” or how this teaching applies to particular cases, are we challenged with a much broader QUESTION? Here, a quote and a speculation:
FIRST, as a condition of membership, states of the secularist European Union do not permit the death penalty. Reading Pope St. John Paul II in this context, we find that “such cases [the need for the death penalty] are very rare, if not practically non-existent” (Gospel of Life, 1995, n. 56); AND that this teaching segues into and prefaces the next: “If such great care must be taken to respect every life, even that of criminals and unjust aggressors, [THEN] the commandment “You shall not kill” has absolute [!] value when it refers to the innocent person [italics]. And all the more so in the case of weak and defenseless human beings….” (n. 57). And yet, abortion is legal and more-or-less routine across all of the secularist European Union and beyond…
SECOND, where current history records the past “Age of Faith,” will future history give us the “Age of Oblique Evangelization?”
Features might be: (a) now “inadmissible” capital punishment, partly to reform—from within—secularist contradictions (the above nn. 56 and 57, together), (b) the Abu Dhabi Declaration’s “pluralism of religions” and human “fraternity” to co-exist with Islam as a (an equivalent?) syncretic artifact of natural religion, (c) “synodality,” even the “binding synodal path” of centripetal Germania, to euphemize the anti-apostolic “tyranny of relativism,” (d) the “provisional” China Accord to avoid a disinterred 12th-century Investiture Crisis, (e) inconclusive “dialog” with president-elect Biden (his cafeteria-Catholic “congruence” with the perennial Eucharistic Church) to muffle any evolving Pact with the World, and (f) in curial reform, speculated eclipse of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith by a more “accompanying” Secretariat of State.
How can the Church still evangelize—from within?—a world which has forgotten, despises and no longer even comprehends the proposed (not imposed) language and vocabulary of the Faith? Can evangelization be done obliquely?
You argument dismantles itself by attempting to set the revelation of the Evangelists in opposition to the revelation of St. Paul the Apostle.
No.
Am too tied up and do not have time on my hands to present my viewpoint in detail (hoping to do so sometime in the future).
But for now, sufficeth to say: St. Paul in Rom. 13 is looking at and speaking about governing authorities of the world who, with all their shortcomings, can only impart imperfect / partial justice. And neither the Old Testament nor St. Paul are wrong in their perspective.
But those perspectives do not mean that they are the be-all and end-all of all perspectives.
Perfect justice and mercy as perceived from the lens of the Gospel and which the Gospel points to can only be found in the Authority who Governs from the Cross.
(Segue to 1 Cor. 13)
Move over, Saints Paul, Augustine, Thomas, Augustine, Alphonse Liguori, Robert Bellarmine, etc. and every pope at least through Pius XII (and probably Benedict XVI) – JN and Francis are here to set the record straight.
Very droll.
Presuming we will be alive for a bit, we can always wait for the next Popes after Francis to see if they or an ecumenical council revoke or affirm the revision to CCC 2267.
Of course, if we are going to talk about the ´St. Gallen mafia´ and how Francis has decked the cards for the next conclave, perhaps we should also have a discussion about the magisterium of the SSPX or the magisterium of the folks at https://novusordowatch.org/ who get to certify the false popes.
It is unpersuasive for bishops to appeal to the opinions of the pontiff who orchestrated idolatry, and who bases “his fiats” on the assumption that he and his like-minded cohort are morally advanced as compared to the millions of people who disagree with him, and the millions-upon-millions who preceded him, including popes and apostles.
2nd try…
It is unpersuasive for bishops to appeal to the opinions of the pontiff who orchestrated idolatry, and who bases “his fiats” on the assumption that he and his like-minded cohort are morally advanced as compared to the millions of people who disagree with him, and the millions-upon-millions who preceded him, including popes and apostles.
We have another bishop who misrepresents the history of Church teaching on capital punishment. As he must know the truth, we can assume it is deliberate. Protection of society was never the main justification for the death penalty, as Edward Feser and others have documented amply. Furthermore, any bishop who speaks about whether modern prisons are sufficient to secure the population from the threat posed by murderers is offering a personal opinion (and not a well-informed one at that). Besides, the top guy at the Vatican also has told us that life sentences are impermissible.
The death penalty opinion of the idolator-pontiff is devoid of any reason other than his high opinion of himself.
Here is the statement published ob behalf of the idolator-pontiff, by the Congregation for the Faith, inserting his personal opnion in no. 2267 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church in 2018 (in brackets I add letters to mark the main points – these leters in brackets are not in the original text):
The death penalty
2267. Recourse to the death penalty on the part of legitimate authority, following a fair trial, was long considered an appropriate response to the gravity of certain crimes and an acceptable, albeit extreme, means of safeguarding the common good.
[A] Today, however, there is an increasing awareness that the dignity of the person is not lost even after the commission of very serious crimes. [B] In addition, a new understanding has emerged of the significance of penal sanctions imposed by the state. [C] Lastly, more effective systems of detention have been developed, which ensure the due protection of citizens but, at the same time, do not definitively deprive the guilty of the possibility of redemption.
[D] Consequently, the Church teaches, in the light of the Gospel, that “the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person”,[1] and she works with determination for its abolition worldwide.
Point A is an arrogant claim to enlightenment by the authors, and at best a foolishly presumptuous (and at worst an intentionally malicious) strawman asserted against any and all who don’t cotton to their flimsy opnion.
Point B seems on its face to be a statement devoid of any meaning, but may be a leftist dog-whistle blown to send a signal to those seeking sanction from the co-traveller now presiding in Rome. (Perhaps reading the pontiff’s associated letter to Bishops about his opnion may shed some light?)
Point C ventures the pontiff’s sweeping opinion that murderers can simply be effectively imprisoned everywhere on earth, which proposal from the pontiff we know to be “disingenuous” coming from his lips, since he has already condemned life sentences for murder.
Which empty premambles bring us to Point D, where the idolator-pontiff references no one but his idolatrous self, and regurgitates his flimsy strawman propped up in Point A, and shows no conviction, since he cannot call what he opposes immoral, because he is prevented from making any statement on morality, as he is bereft of moral authority, and enjoys nothing more than juridical authority, having been elected by sociopath-party run by Danneels and McCarrick.
Either the Catholic Church was wrong for two thousand years for upholding the licitness of Capital Punishment, after a fair trial and when necessary to safeguard society, or Francis is wrong now for stating it is always wrong regardless of circumstances. The former is impossible, as the Church is infallible and cannot err on such a subject for such a long period of time. The latter is possible, as Popes can and do err when Papal Infallibility is not applicable. Especially with Pope Francis’s record on being wrong on so many other issues (just war, private property, communion for those living in adultery, Idolatry, etc).