During the last 163 years, bishops from the Catholic church have acknowledged greater than 70 medical miracles related to The Sanctuary of Our Girl of Lourdes in southern France. Annually, greater than 3 million pilgrims go to the small city. Many make the journey to Lourdes as a result of they’ve heard the tales of the miraculous medical recoveries which have taken place there.
This week on 60 Minutes, correspondent Invoice Whitaker reports on the Lourdes Office of Medical Observations the place world-renowned medical doctors and researchers conduct decade-long investigations into the numerous claims of cures. They decide which circumstances might be medically defined and which can not in accordance with present medical information. The workplace is overseen by Dr. Alessandro de Franciscis, a former pediatrician and Harvard educated epidemiologist, who serves because the workplace’s president and residing doctor.
Two medical miracles had been acknowledged for the reason that 60 Minutes group visited Lourdes in 2022, bringing the variety of medical miracles acknowledged by the Catholic Church to 72.
“We [are] in search of a analysis and if that analysis is a analysis of a extreme illness with a extreme prognosis,” Dr. de Franciscis informed 60 Minutes in 2022. “After which, we need to ensure that that particular person is an individual that was cured in a method that one would say instantly…in an instantaneous method, in a whole method, in a method lasting in time. And…my seventh standards that has to match is there have to be no potential rationalization to that treatment.”
What separates the greater than 7,000 recorded claims of cures from the 72 that church officers have acknowledged as miracles, is an incredible quantity of medical documentation and a affected person’s willingness to place their life underneath a microscope.
The medical circumstances labeled as miracles in Lourdes have been scrutinized for many years. Skeptics level out medical science was not as rigorous within the late 1800s and surprise how strictly the workplace’s standards have been interpreted through the years. But, nobody has been in a position to disprove its conclusions.
Dr. Esther Sternberg is a number one scholar on the thoughts physique connection and the Analysis Director on the College of Arizona’s Andrew Weil Heart for Integrative Medication. She and two exterior colleagues analyzed the reliability of the Lourdes medical data and published their findings in 2014 within the Journal of the Historical past of Medication and Allied Sciences.
“As medical science and rigor in analysis progressed…figuring out whether or not one thing was an unexplained treatment progressed as properly,” Dr. Sternberg stated to 60 Minutes in 2022. “They [Lourdes Office of Medical Observations] saved including these completely different layers of analysis…and extra diagnostic measures. After which following them up for an extended time.”
Dr. Sternberg informed 60 Minutes her evaluation discovered the workplace made their determinations to the most effective of their potential and he or she discovered their conclusions to be credible.
Whereas reporting on the story again in 2022, the manufacturing group of Nichole Marks and John Gallen tracked down 4 dwelling individuals whose circumstances have been acknowledged as miracles.
Vittorio Micheli recovered from osteosarcoma in his hip in 1963. In 1965, Sister Luigina Traverso was cured of close to complete paralysis. In 1976, Delizia Cirolli’s cancerous tumor vanished from her proper knee. And, in 2008, Sister Bernadette Moriau was cured of Cauda Equina, a dysfunction of the nerves and decrease backbone. In 2022, all 4 individuals informed 60 Minutes that they had been wholesome and freed from their authentic illness.
The video above was initially printed on December 18, 2022. It was produced by Keith Zubrow and edited by Sarah Shafer Prediger.
Pictures of Vittorio Micheli and Sister Traverso courtesy of the Sanctuary of Our Girl of Lourdes Archives
