Simply the fact that there are five million visits to Lourdes each year shows that healing miracles must happen today, otherwise why would so many (70,000 sick people come each year) people come to be healed? Many people have been healed at Lourdes, could you call all of these people liars and fakes? Yet the Church is reluctant to declare miracles and have only declared sixty-five miracles. This shows how reluctantly they use the term miracle. Mary Bigot fell ill at the age of fourteen and after a number of operations she became deaf, blind and paralysed on her right hand side. She went to Lourdes on 1952, yet nothing happened. She returned a year later and attended the Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament; she had a cramp and could feel the hot water bottle, yet remained deaf and blind. In 1954 whilst at Lourdes she could hear knocks and the Hail Mary’s of the rosary, two days later in the grotto all of a sudden she could see perfectly. She was healed in three stages in three different places. This shows that you should never take anything for granted. Two years later it was proclaimed a miracle by the church – this shows how closely the church inspects each ‘healing’ miracle that is claimed at Lourdes.
Those who do not believe in God will not believe in miracles. For example as Jesus says in the story of the rich man and Lazarus, no matter what Moses and the prophets do to warn his (the rich man’s) brother’s, they do not listen and ‘will not be convinced’ even if somebody was to rise from the dead. However in the case of Jeannes Fretel, who had been in a coma for three moths and had previously had tuberculosis, after receiving the Holy Communion at Lourdes, she opened her eyes and she was cured. At the sight of this, her own doctor changed his belief in miracles (her case was acknowledged to years later). This shows that her doctor believed in God yet he needed to see in order to believe in miracles. Faith recognises miracles, it does not create it, and it is down to God – that is why not everyone is cured at Lourdes. Miracles are signs to believe in God’s love, they open up the mystery of God; it is not proof of the existence of God. However God does not work against his laws of nature, an amputated arm will not grow back, scar will not disappear and your genetic heritage will not change.
I have given examples of miracles actually happening in our world, the world that we live in today there are religious and non-religious arguments about things that happen in this world. Not everyone accepts the same viewpoint of, for example, the definition of the term miracle. This may be because of the way they were brought up or what they feel is correct classification. All miracles may have a scientific explanation but at the moment we do not have enough knowledge or technology to be able to find a logical answer to explain how somebody is healed. So although this may be true we do not have
any proof to say that it is so we have to have some way to explain these things and at this present
moment in time I and many other people will say that it is a miraculous event down to the power of God. I believe that miracles do happen today, but even so I understand that some people do not agree with my point of view. This may be because of their beliefs or just because they feel that there must be a logical explanation for everything, others may suggest that miracles are explained as luck or coincidence. I also have my own experiences of what I believe to have been a miracle and this (peoples experiences) will also influence people’s opinions on whether they believe that miracles do happen today. I have a great Aunt that is now 93, about two years ago she was taken to hospital and the doctors thought that she had a 10% chance of survival. Being a catholic she was visited by the hospital Chaplin and she was given the sacrament of the anointing of the sick. Then she stopped eating her food and they almost gave up hope. One night they tuned off her life support machine and stopped giving her medicine expecting her to dead in the morning. However, the next morning she was alive and well, eating and reading a book. In my opinion, this is a miracle, unless of course that the medicine they were giving her was harming my great Aunt. But I do not think that this is true, as the doctors know what they are doing. I also believe in miracles because if they happened in the past as a result of God working through Jesus, they should still happen today as God is still here and present in our lives.
