> Initial discussion and follow-up by the Lourdes Medical Bureau - If it appears that a claim of a cure is serious, the chief physician at Lourdes convenes a 'Bureau' for discussing the case, to which all doctors and healthcare workers present in Lourdes at that time are invited, regardless of their religious belief. The Bureau doesn't make an immediate decision - the alleged cure may be just a temporary remission after all - but a file will be passed on to the next stage if and when a three-quarters majority is satisfied that a genuine cure has occurred.
> Detailed investigation by the International Medical Committee of Lourdes (CMIL) - A national committee from 1947 and international from 1954, this committee consists of twenty to thirty doctors and medical professors "respected in their own particular area." Members are not always all Catholics, though judging by statements on their website they probably are all Christians; it is chaired jointly by the Bishop of Tarbes and Lourdes and one of its members nominated by the Bishop, with the doctor of Lourdes serving as secretary. One or more of its members are charged with examining a case in detail and informing themselves on all the medical literature published on related subjects, potentially consulting with colleagues on the outside, and reporting at an annual meeting. When everything is in place (which can take some time) the committee decides by way of a vote whether to declare or refuse to confirm that this cure is inexplicable according to present scientific knowledge. This vote requires a two-thirds majority to pass. An article in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (Dowling, 1984) describes the process in some detail:
- The report is then discussed critically at length under 18 headings, a vote being taken at each stage. In the first three stages the Committee considers the diagnosis and has to satisfy itself that a correct diagnosis has been made and proven by the production of the results of full physical examination, laboratory investigations, X-ray studies and endoscopy and biopsy where applicable: failure at this stage is commonly because of inadequate investigation or missing documents. At the next two stages the Committee must be satisfied that the disease was organic and serious without any significant degree of psychological overlay. Next it must make sure that the natural history of the disease precludes the possibility of spontaneous remission and that the medical treatment given cannot have effected the cure: cases ruled out here are those about which there cannot be any certainty that the treatment has not been effective - e.g. a course of cytotoxic drugs would lead to the case being rejected, even where the likelihood of success was small. Then the evidence that the patient has indeed been cured is scrutinized and the Committee must be satisfied that both objective signs and subjective symptoms have disappeared and that investigations are normal. The suddenness and completeness of the cure are considered together with any sequelae. Finally, the adequacy of the length of follow up is considered.
There have been twenty-eight Lourdes healings confirmed as miraculous since 1948. For my own ease of reference, I have listed the modern cures both in order of the cure date, and in order they were declared to be miracles here in Google Sheets, which should be visible to anyone.
Personal assessment
It's possible that they were all 'miracles' of course, but as a sceptic there are some obvious problems with assuming that to be the case. For starters, if up to one-third of the CMIL members - Christian doctors nominated by the Catholic Church - may have considered some of those miracles to be explainable by the medical science of their own day, why should any non-Christian sceptic give them a second thought? And secondly, the occurrence of those alleged miracles is remarkably unbalanced: Going by date of cure rather than date of acknowledgement, there were seven miraculous cures in the 1940s and eleven in the 1950s... then two in the 1960s, two in the 1970s and two in the 1980s.
From those numbers, I think it's not unreasonable to suppose that the Bureau and Committee since the 1960s has held itself to higher standards of scepticism than in the 1940s and 50s. That doesn't mean that the earlier cures were not miraculous; though with human error and biases being what they are, not to mention more limited medical knowledge and technology in earlier decades, presumably some of them were not. But if we hold ourselves to the highest levels of scepticism, and given our limited time and patience for a full investigation, it would be sensible focus only on the acknowledged cures which have occurred since 1960.
Considering the first problem, I contacted the enquiries center of the Lourdes website, asking "whether there is any record for the breakdown of votes on whether a healing is unexplained: EG, Were there any unanimous or near-unanimous votes, and how many were a narrow majority?" They eventually replied saying that "Unfortunately there are no records of votes on the cures that have been discussed and voted at CMIL. The required quorum is however of at least 2/3 of the voters." That's disappointing. However I think that any easy presumptions on that basis are offset by two key points:
- The fact, which I didn't initially know, that referral from the Bureau requires at least a three-quarters majority of doctors not specifically nominated by the Church (albeit presumably less informed on the specifics of both the illness and the case than the CMIL will be), and
- The decision above to focus primarily on cures where the process was obviously not as 'trigger-happy' as it was (albeit only by comparison!*) in the first thirteen years.
* Of the cases examined in an article from Oxford University's Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences (Francois et al, 2012; Figure 2), in the first thirteen years from 1947, some 14 cures were confirmed by the Committee compared with 648 files open with the Bureau (2.16%); whereas throughout the 60s, 70s and 80s there were 11 confirmed cures against 693 open Bureau files (1.59%).
A third obvious and often-raised point of potential scepticism regarding the cures of Lourdes generally is that they seem to have stopped - the last confirmed cure occurred in 1989. However I think this one is mistaken or misleading for at least two reasons. Firstly, the implication that if no alleged cures from 1990 onwards are 'medically inexplicable' the earlier cures mustn't have been remarkable either is faulty logic; if that were so, it should be relatively easy for modern doctors to explain many of those alleged miracles, yet that doesn't generally seem to be the case (see below). But secondly and perhaps more importantly, there seems to be little reason to expect that there should have been many cures since 1990 confirmed yet to begin with. Based on the six confirmed cures which have occurred since 1960, the average wait between the cure and its confirmation as a 'miracle' has been over 19 years; so by 2017, we'd have little reason to expect that any cures since 1999 would have been confirmed yet. And with an average of one cure per five years during 1960-1990, we might somewhat fallaciously expect that there 'should' have been a cure from the mid 1990s confirmed by now, but that's about it. That is obviously a very poor basis for any presumption that the cures have stopped!
Sceptical reactions
Obviously before leaping to any conclusions, it's important to have a look around and see if there are any easy or obvious alternatives to consider. However outside of a few specifics, this doesn't seem to be the case:
> The Skeptic's Dictionary provides some interesting perspectives and statistics, but does not actually dispute any of the 28 'miracles' confirmed since 1948.
> The Miracle Sceptic site offers a great deal of scathing rhetoric, but directly disputes only a single one of the reported miracles (Delizia Cirolli, cured 1976).
> A second disputed case is reported by James Randi, as quoted in Wikipedia (Serge Perrin, cured 1970; which may be alluded to in the Miracle Sceptic site, though in the midst of all its vague rhetoric it's hard to be sure).
In both of the latter cases, the sceptics appeal to alternative medical opinions which necessarily will be less familiar with the specifics of the case than the doctors doing the initial investigations. Moreover one cannot help but wonder whether they would get the same answers if they asked two or three or different doctor's/groups' opinions; or indeed, whether they had to ask for a few opinions before getting the sceptical responses publicized. Nevertheless these - like the 'mere' two-thirds majority vote required by the CMIL - highlight the fact that unanimity is virtually impossible to attain in any field outside mathematics and the hard physical sciences (and even then, often only after a matter of decades!). I'm reminded of the fact that only 80-90% of climate scientists acknowledge the dominant human impact on recent warming, for example
An even more interesting sceptical opinion comes from a member of the CMIL himself which I was lucky enough to stumble across in a transcript of a BBC radio programme. Dr. Dennis Daly offers a somewhat scathing criticism for the case of "an Italian soldier" (Vittorio Michelli, cured 1963), which I'm inclined to agree was a suspect case from what I've read elsewhere. But the main topic of the programme was the cure of Jean-Pierre Bely (cured 1987), which Dr. Daly evidently cast his vote as being not currently medically inexplicable, simply on the basis of doubts about the diagnosis.
This is particularly interesting because it highlights how stringent the Lourdes requirements actually are: Members of the CMIL consider, quite fairly and appropriately, that they should refrain from giving a positive vote to a cure such as Bely's merely because they question the specific diagnosis. This is already quite a long OP, so I'll make this the only one of the six post-1960 cures that I describe, at least to begin with. But I think it's important to note (while also bearing in mind that most of the doctors did confirm this diagnosis) that even with his speculation that the illness may have been "psychological or psychiatric," Dr. Daly suggests that this cure would be "still a very remarkable thing":
- Bely was born on August 24, 1936. By profession, he was an anesthesia and intensive-care nurse. In 1972 he began to suffer growing neurological incapacity, which eventually was diagnosed as multiple sclerosis. By 1984 he was walking with a cane, and in 1985 he required a wheelchair. Two years later, he was in a devastating state: bedridden, he received a 100% invalidity pension and an allowance for a third person to look after him.
In October, 1987, Jean-Pierre Bely went on pilgrimage to Lourdes. After celebrating the Sacrament of Reconciliation in the sick room on October 8, Bely received the Sacrament of the Sick the next day during Mass in the Rosary Square. He was part of the French Rosary Pilgrimage. All of a sudden, he was overcome by a powerful sense of interior liberation and peace, something he had never experienced before.
On Friday, October 9 at midday, while lying in the sick room he experienced a sense of cold which grew stronger and became painful only to give way to a subsequent feeling of warmth which grew in intensity. Bely sat on the edge of his bed and was able to move his arms. The following night, although in a deep sleep, he woke up suddenly and discovered he could walk -- for the first time, since 1984.
At the end of the pilgrimage, Bely traveled to the station in his wheelchair, so as not to appear different from his "companions in sickness." But by the time he reached the train, he decided to enter alone and remain seated during the return journey to his home town of Angouleme. He had regained the complete use of his physical faculties, and the medical reports showed no trace of illness.
Was this a miracle cure? It's obvious that even with all the careful documentation and investigation in place at Lourdes, it is quite probably impossible to achieve unanimity and certainty in this area (as in any other). But perhaps a more pertinent question would be whether even the most die-hard sceptics can brush incidents like this aside without question or pause? Is the oft-repeated mantra of "zero evidence" that paranormal events occur actually an objective assessment?
Or should a reasonable enquirer conclude that there is very intriguing and even compelling evidence, regardless of whether or not it meets one's personal threshold for 'belief,' for trying to fit it into one's worldview?
