Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time - Miracles
St Mary's Cathedral
Lev 13:1-2, 44-46; 1 Cor 10:31-11:1; Mk 1:40-45
+ Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney
16 Feb 2003
Until a couple of hundred years ago medicine was very primitive. We all know there has been spectacular medical progress during the past 20 or 50 years and this is still continuing.
What could only be achieved by a miracle in Our Lord's time is often now attained regularly by doctors and nurses. We should not take this for granted, but thank God for one of the many blessings of modern life.
In particular leprosy was a terrible curse from Old Testament times right through to the nineteenth century. Last year we had the launch of a good film about Fr Damian of Molokai, who spent his life with a community of lepers, condemned to isolation on this Pacific Island. We can imagine what conditions could be like socially and morally in such a desperate situation.
In Moses' and Aaron's time, through to Our Lord's, there was no cure for leprosy and lepers had to be isolated; a terrible punishment on top of the disease, because everyone knew leprosy was contagious.
Jesus' immediate cure of the leper was a spectacular miracle - and such an instant cure would still be a spectacular miracle today, although there is very little leprosy in Australia, with only a few cases in isolated communities and in gaols. Jesus felt sorry for the man and cured him to help him.
This beautiful incident is a good starting point for a few words about miracles, especially visions and cures in the New Testament and today.
Most people use the word "miracle" loosely to describe an unexpected return to health, or a lucky escape, or a sporting victory snatched from the brink of disaster. Adam Gilchrist's 149 runs to defeat Pakistan in 1999 at Hobart was a little short of a first class miracle!
Traditionally religious people define a miracle as a special intervention by God, which goes beyond the normal order of things, for a religious purpose. Miracles are not like supernatural fire works; it is not as though God is showing off. Miracles from God help people; miracles from an evil power confuse or hurt people.
Those who believe that God is no more than the mysterious forces of nature do not believe in miracles. These are called pantheists. Neither do those who believe God set up the universe to run according to a set of rules and then left it alone, like someone winding a watch. These are called deists.
Christians believe in a personal God, Creator and First Cause of creation, who is interested in each one of us and does have the power to intervene in ways beyond nature, to answer our prayers. But I have never experienced a miraculous cure nor a miraculous vision, although I happily concede that miracles can and do continue to occur.
Another approach is taken by many Protestants who believe in Christ's miracles in New Testament times, but do not believe miracles occur today.
The Catholic Church has ruled that we can safely believe that Mary, the mother of Jesus, appeared to Bernadette Soubirous at Lourdes, France 1858, but no Catholic is obliged to believe this.
No scientist or doctor can certainly define a cure as a miracle, but they can explain that some events cannot be explained by present human knowledge. There is a long list of such "miracle cures" at Lourdes.
To be beyond human explanation is one criterion for a miracle. If there are messages, they must conform to Gospel and Church teaching, and any activities encouraged should be proper and result in people becoming holier and healthier, not uncharitable and neurotic.
It is interesting to note that before a person can be declared officially as a saint, a couple of miracles are usually required, which follow prayers to the saint for such a favour. Our own Blessed Mary MacKillop is one step short of sainthood and needs another miracle.
All of this brings us to two different happenings, the alleged apparition of the Virgin Mary at the Dolphin Point headland at Coogee and the visit to Sydney of Ivan Dragicevic from Medjugorje in Bosnia Herzegovina, who claims that Our Lady has been appearing to him daily at 6.40pm since 1981.
As a Catholic Archbishop I cannot endorse either of these, but I certainly do not condemn those who believe otherwise and have gone there to pray.
Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of sceptical or indifferent young Christians, some of them Australian, have undergone genuine religious conversions at Medjugorje, but the Church has ruled that the supernatural quality of these visions cannot be guaranteed. Some things are worrying. Our Lady seems to be talking too much.
Dolphin Point was already a special place with its memorial to the Coogee Dolphin's Bali victims and the repeated damage to the fence there is despicable.
However, as most who see the vision in the afternoon are 100 metres away or more, the overwhelming probability is that people are building on or "improving" an optical illusion.
Believers too should be slow to claim supernatural interventions, but we must believe that God loves us, listens to our prayers and always answers them in some way, even when our main requests are unanswered.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
