An amazing story is in the BBC News report "Australian woman tells how 19th century nun 'cured cancer' " (Bryant, 2010). Nick Bryant's report is very short, and is mainly a video reporting on the experience of an Australian woman who believes that her cancer was cured by a miracle. The Vatican, under Pope Benedict XVI, has approved this miracle, so that Mary McKillop can now be made an official saint of the Catholic Church.
What seems to me most amazing about this story is the Pope's definition of miracle. According to the Pope, a miracle is something for which there is no scientific or rational definition. Now, this is a perfectly acceptable definition, but what it actually means is "we have absolutely no sensible explanation for what happened". In other words, the Vatican accepts as prove of a divine intervention anything about which they are perfectly ignorant. Perfect ignorance does not seem to me to be solid support for anything. If we don't know, the morally honest and correct thing is to admit that we do not know. Calling it a miracle and pretending that that is evidence of something does not seem honest to me.
What seems to me most amazing about this story is the Pope's definition of miracle. According to the Pope, a miracle is something for which there is no scientific or rational definition. Now, this is a perfectly acceptable definition, but what it actually means is "we have absolutely no sensible explanation for what happened". In other words, the Vatican accepts as prove of a divine intervention anything about which they are perfectly ignorant. Perfect ignorance does not seem to me to be solid support for anything. If we don't know, the morally honest and correct thing is to admit that we do not know. Calling it a miracle and pretending that that is evidence of something does not seem honest to me.
I should add, I am very happy for the woman, Kathleen Evans, that she was cured of her cancer; however, as Kathleen herself clearly says, twice, in her comments in the video, "there is no explanation," which to me means that there is no explanation, not that a saintly intervention is known to be the correct explanation.
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References
Bryant, N. (2010, January 11). Australian woman tells how 19th century nun 'cured cancer'. BBC News. Retrieved January 12, 2010 from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8452403.stm
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