A Miracle

If someone believes utterly that her prayers to Blessed Basil Moreau will save her from death, and her illness vanishes, and doctors gape, is that a miracle?

By Paul Myers

Last summer I was sitting at a table in Le Mans, France, where Blessed Basil Moreau had founded the Congregation of Holy Cross in 1837. There were a number of men and women at my table, all of them gathered to discuss the spirituality of this remarkable Catholic order. People had come from twelve countries. The meal was amazing. As dessert was winding down a Holy Cross nun from Canada across the table suddenly rose and began to speak.

She said her name was Liette Finnerty. She said she was sorry to interrupt conversations but she felt compelled to tell her story. She said that she had recently been diagnosed with a serious heart condition and that her doctor told her that nothing could be done. She had been terrified by this news. While she was in the hospital she was given a relic of Father Moreau by a sister in her community. She had clutched the relic tightly to her heart and prayed intensely for Moreau’s intercession for three days. During those same three days her Holy Cross sisters also prayed intensely to Moreau for help.

Soon after her doctors did some pre-operative tests and discovered that her condition had completely cleared. Her doctors admitted that there was no physical or medical explanation whatsoever for her spontaneous healing. She said that she believes with all her heart that she was healed by the intercession of Basil Moreau, that she was intensely grateful to him, and that she had quietly shared the news of her healing with the Vatican.

Then she sat down and there was a great silence.

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If you heard the clarity of her voice and saw the confidence in her body and saw the gratitude in her eyes you would know like I do that there was not an atom in her body that doubted whether Moreau had worked a miracle. I sipped my coffee for a while, not knowing what to say. She sat silent across the table. I worked up the courage to thank her for sharing her story. She looked me straight in the eye and said I just told you all what I had to tell you. I deserve no thanks. And she stared down into her tea and fiddled with the sugar bowl.

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What does it mean if God reaches down and puts His finger on your heart, when so many other people never feel His touch, when so many people perish in pain, when so many are bereft of human love, when so many suffer, when so many despair? Why was this blunt Canadian nun chosen for healing, if indeed she was?

I sat there, confused, and I am still confused. For many years I have believed with all my heart, especially as a trained scientist, that the laws of nature, the nature that comes from God and is riven with God’s light and life, do not have to be violated by God to prove that God exists or that God loves us. That seemed an incredibly arrogant proposition on its face: We, the creatures of the Lord, need the Creator to do magic for us to authenticate His existence? Could there be a more foolish idea than that?

No, I believed that there are miracles, uncountable oceans of them, but that they do abide by the laws of God’s creation in ways we do not expect or understand — that miracles are like God, unimaginable, beyond our comprehension. And I believed too that most miracles occur in hearts and minds and souls; most miracles, in other words, are transformations in ways we cannot see or measure.

Yet there was Liette Finnerty, who had been healed suddenly for reasons no doctor could explain.

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Miracles and justice seem to be independent of one another. How rarely are the innocent spared abuse, exploitation, and atrocity, even as prayers ring out around the globe and around the clock, from mothers and fathers, children and grandparents, monks and nuns, men and women and children of every faith and creed and need?

Rarely.

And is it rare for windfalls and miracles to fall into the laps of the bully, the arrogant, the violent?

Not rare at all.

But how many prayers go out in thanks too, how many prayers of praise, how many hearts brimming with gratitude, how many whispered thanks rippling into outer space and traveling into the stars.

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In each of our lives there are moments when we begged for a miracle with all of our being. We have all seen fatal accidents. We have all held the weary hands of someone we love in the hospital. We have all rubbed the bony backs of those we love as they struggled with pain or nausea or despair. We have all stood silent before someone who lost a love. We have all cal-led out to God, each and every one of us, with whatever words we have, and we have all felt unanswered and unheeded and empty. Instead of a miracle we felt only ache in the marrow of our bones, and heard only the cold beeping of medical machinery, and tasted only tears.

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So often these searing moments are followed by someone saying, with the best of intentions, God’s time is different from our time, God’s purposes are beyond our ken, but those are not very comforting words, are they?

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And, as we stare at horrors, how can we believe that anything good can ever come from such evil? It is a very tall order indeed to believe that good comes from evil, life comes from death, joy comes from pain. Yet all three of those things are true. Spes unica, taught Basil Moreau. The cross is our only hope. Through pain to joy.

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Moreau believed, with all his complex heart, that miracles flash by us all the time, an unending shower of them, brilliant and instant, too quick and searing for us to see but dimly and occasionally. And he believed that miracles come by embracing one’s crosses. He talked about this, preached it, felt it, lived it as much as anyone ever has on this graced earth. There is an abundance of hope exactly in moments of despair, he said; when we are most broken we are most open to revelation and love and hope and rebirth and resurrection. Yet when we are most broken we are most likely to lose hope, to drown in fear and rage and despair. Perhaps that very crossroads is where we decide for ourselves between light and dark. Perhaps we make miracles ourselves.

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How ironic that the Church depends on verifiable miracles to affirm the sainthood of people like Basil Moreau, when the Church itself acknowledges that the vast majority of miracles are unverifiable transformations of hearts and minds. But here we are, human.

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Thousands and thousands of men and women have taken vows and given their very lives to the congregation that Moreau built. Isn’t that miraculous? And his order has survived 170 years of epidemics, wars, revolutions, debt, violence, religious infighting, much else. Isn’t that miraculous? Priests and sisters and brothers have joined the order from Europe, the Americas, Oceania, Africa, and Asia. Isn’t that miraculous? Millions of men and women and children have been moved, challenged, inspired, healed, educated, and elevated by members of Moreau’s spiritual family throughout the world. Isn’t that miraculous?

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Moreau’s beatification in September of this year was the result of the verification of a miracle in 1948 when a Canadian woman, suffering from pleuritis in her lung, was cured instantly and without medical explanation. It takes two verifiable miracles to become a saint. I sat across the table last summer and stared at Liette Finnerty and wondered if her healing was Moreau’s second miracle. I don’t know. I’ll never know. Yet I believe. Isn’t that miraculous?

Dr. Paul Myers is the director of the University’s Health and Counseling Center. He has written of Moreau, the legendary Father John Delaunay, and of our students in these pages.