Greetings web denizens, heathens, zealots and the rest of you!
So big news from the Vatican today. Two popes — John XXIII and John Paul II — are about to made saints.
Let the eye rolling begin.
I know for many Catholics the word “saint” is short had to describe someone they believe to be good beyond the best of humanity. But officially, a saint has to have two bona fide miracles to his name. Card tricks, apparently, don’t count. Being “good” isn’t really the issue. Having supernatural powers, even after death, is what the Vatican is looking for.
The sainthood of John XXIII is not without some controversy since he only has one lousy miracle to his name. JP2, on the other hand, is said to have cured two women after he died.
The Vatican and the Catholic press will often go to get lengths to tell us how carefully the Vatican studies the “evidence” for these miracles. But it is worth noting these claims are never independantly investigated by, you know, scientists and that every time claims of miracles, which are by definition of a suspension of the physical order of the universe — in other words the laws of physics are temporarily cast down — are examined honesty with respect for evidence, they fall apart. Like the miracle attributed to Mother Teresa for instance, as Christopher Hitchens pointed out:
As for the “miracle” that had to be attested, what can one say? Surely any respectable Catholic cringes with shame at the obviousness of the fakery. A Bengali woman named Monica Besra claims that a beam of light emerged from a picture of MT, which she happened to have in her home, and relieved her of a cancerous tumor. Her physician, Dr. Ranjan Mustafi, says that she didn’t have a cancerous tumor in the first place and that the tubercular cyst she did have was cured by a course of prescription medicine. Was he interviewed by the Vatican’s investigators? No. (As it happens, I myself was interviewed by them but only in the most perfunctory way. The procedure still does demand a show of consultation with doubters, and a show of consultation was what, in this case, it got.)
According to an uncontradicted report in the Italian paper L’Eco di Bergamo, the Vatican’s secretary of state sent a letter to senior cardinals in June, asking on behalf of the pope whether they favored making MT a saint right away. The pope’s clear intention has been to speed the process up in order to perform the ceremony in his own lifetime. The response was in the negative, according to Father Brian Kolodiejchuk, the Canadian priest who has acted as postulator or advocate for the “canonization.” But the damage, to such integrity as the process possesses, has already been done.
The entire concept of miracles is mostly a history of shams and credulity. And thus, I give you the return of the Hitchslap, with the Hitch talking about the empty sack that is the very idea of a miracle:
