Miracle's

[skyward]

Hi,

I have been researching the catholic faith intensivley these past month’s and have come across picture’s and video’s of various miraculous phenomenon such as stigmata, weeping statues and cadavers that do not seem to decompose.

My questions are thus:

Do the church investigate these miracles and to what extent?

Have any of the occurences been investigated by an impartial (non-catholic) party?

Has anyone here visited or seen one of these truly bewildering occurances?

Kindest regards.

 

[JMJ_coder]

Hi,

I have been researching the catholic faith intensivley these past month’s and have come across picture’s and video’s of various miraculous phenomenon such as stigmata, weeping statues and cadavers that do not seem to decompose.

My questions are thus:

Do the church investigate these miracles and to what extent?

Have any of the occurences been investigated by an impartial (non-catholic) party?

Has anyone here visited or seen one of these truly bewildering occurances?

Kindest regards.

The Church investigates the notable miracles thoroughly. I say notable because the Church doesn’t waste its time on every grilled cheese sandwich. It will only address those alleged miracles and apparitions that have gained considerable attention already. And not every alleged miracle and apparition is true and the Church as ruled negatively on large numbers of such (either because of lack of evidence or lack of credibility or clearly demonic in nature).

To give you a general feel, during the course of investigating a miracle for a canonization, the miracle claimed that a boy was healed miraculously from oxygen deprivation. During the course of the investigation all of the medical staff was interviewed and depositions taken – the staff not all believers – and records obtained.

Many miracles have been investigated by non-Catholic parties. Some may not be given as much access as they might like (since the Church won’t let full-fledged desecration of relics and such), but very small samples of various relics are taken and distributed to the scientific community. For example, thorough scientific study has been conducted on the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe from scientist to artists and they have no explanation for the incredible properties – indeed the non-Catholics have even discovered in their investigations unnatural phenomenon that was up until then unknown. They have even used expensive equipment, like you’d find in an eye doctors office and I think they did spectographic analysis on it, too. The same is true of the Eucharistic Miracle of Lanciano. On that one, for example, scientists weighed the blood, which is in 7 globules (I think). They discovered that each individual globule weighs precisely the same as all of them put together. Science tells us that is impossible, but scientists made an observation of it.

I have not personally witnessed any miracle investigated and recognized by the Church, which isn’t to say I’ve never seen a miracle.

 

[MarkThompson]

JMJ_coder is right. The Church takes the testimony of people who are involved, and this routinely includes doctors, pathologists, and the like who are Protestants, Jews, even atheists.