THE "MIRACLE" THAT GOT POPE JOHN CANONISED
MY COMMENT
Pope Francis manipulated the situation to get canonising Pope John XXIII. That somebody would use a person who was ill to engineer a miracle as an excuse for doing that is horrific. It shows no real empathy for the sick.
HERE ARE THE FACTS
Investigative Files by Joe Nickell Volume 39.2, March/April 2015 exposed the miracles used by the Church to declare Pope John Paul II a saint.
He points out that the Church now looks for healing miracles.
"The current preference is for healing miracles—no doubt in part because they are easier to obtain and less likely to involve magic tricks." It is easier to fool people with nature's wonders.
A single “miracle” is attributed to Pope John Paul XXIII. A second miracle—usually required for canonization—was waived by Pope Francis, on the basis of John’s having called the historic Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), which dramatically changed the church.
As with the miracles attributed to John Paul II, the reputed miracle—which occurred in 1966 after an Italian nun suffered unexplained stomach hemorrhages—seemed suspiciously ironic: Pope John had himself died of stomach cancer, despite the church’s healing shrines, relics, and other touted mechanisms.
The nun, Sister Caterina Capitani, was hospitalized and underwent a five-hour operation to remove most of her tumor-studded stomach, along with her pancreas and spleen. Over several days she began to recover but noticed that a fistula (an abnormal opening) had developed on her abdomen, allowing gastric fluid, blood, and a little orange juice she had sipped, to flow out. Later she covered the area with a relic—a piece of the sheet upon which Pope John XXIII had died. Still later, she awakened to a vision of the dead pontiff and found herself healed. She ate ravenously and subsequently returned to a normal life (Allegri 2014).
In fact, Mrs. Capitani, who died in 2010 at age sixty-eight, obviously benefitted from several successful surgeries. It was not a miracle by the deceased Pope John XXIII that removed her stomach tumors; it was medical science. As to the alleged fistula, it may have been nonexistent, a mistaken claim to explain stomach contents that appeared on her abdomen but that may have simply resulted from “a serious crisis of vomiting.” Capitani had a “very high fever” and may have misperceived the situation. She is the source of the second-hand claim, attributed to an unnamed doctor and apparently not otherwise documented (Allegri 2014). Alternately, if it actually existed, the wound had eleven days to heal naturally. Her experience of seeing Pope John standing beside her bed and speaking to her is consistent with a waking dream (which occurs between being fully asleep and awake). As she herself admitted, “I wondered whether it had been a dream” (Allegri 2014).
Conclusions
As these examples demonstrate, there is invariably more to miracle claims than
first meets the eye. What is truly objectionable are miraculists’ attempts to
trump modern medical science—not only by downplaying science’s role in cures but
by choosing remarkable cases so as to emphasize their supposedly “medically
inexplicable” nature. No matter how well-intentioned, by attempting to assert
superiority over science with supernatural claims and the illogic of arguing
from ignorance, one succeeds only in promoting superstition.
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