|
THE primary meaning o f“miracle” in the Oxford Dictionary of the
English Language is “a marvelous event not ascribable to human or
natural agency, and therefore attributed to the intervention of a
supernatural agent, esp. (in Christian belief) God…”
In current demotic language, “miracles” have
nothing to do with God. Thus, a miracle drug or cure; a miracle rice
or wheat strain; a miracle fruit, an African berry (Synsepalum
dulcificum) that can make sour or salty things taste sweet, etc. are
all either man-made or within human comprehension.
Post-war Germany under Ludwig Erhard and
post-Mao China under Deng Xiaoping were characterized as miracle
economies although no journalist has gone as far as to canonize
Erhard or Deng because they merely applied the idea of open markets
whose mechanisms and effects are so well-understood that there’s
nothing sacral to invoke.
I bring all this up in connection with a recent
order from the Vatican on nominations for sainthood and the
procedure for saint-making. The Congregation for the Causes of
Saints published last month a 45-page manual on canonization.
Apparently, the sitting Pope, Benedict XVI, has
been bothered by the relaxation of some of the rules for sainthood
during the papacy of John Paul II. The order called for “strict
adherence” to the revised guidelines because some procedures have
become “problematic.”
Pope John Paul II, it will be recalled,
canonized about 500 saints, and beatified 1,340 people. He
accomplished this by doing away with the 5-year waiting period
before the process, or “cause” as it’s known in the Vatican,
of identifying a saint could go forward. He also acquiesced to the
beatification or canonization of persons in under-represented
regions and countries.
During Pope John Paul’s funeral in April 2005,
Benedict ignored the crowd’s demand for John Paul to be made a
saint immediately. Similarly, the cause of Archbishop Oscar Romero
of San Salvador, who was murdered while saying mass in 1980, was put
on hold because Benedict does not like political saints.
The Vatican’s volte face is due to the
possible consequences of faulty procedures that might invite public
derision and thus weaken belief and faith in the teachings of the
Roman Catholic Church. Saints, after all, are for “public
veneration” and therefore their inclusion in the ranks of heavenly
hosts should be beyond doubt or cavil.
This is where Benedict’s guidelines become
also problematical. To become a blessed, a person must have
performed a miracle; two miracles are required of a saint. The
examination of miracles must use “all clinical and technical
means.” The purpose of this rigorous requirement is to seek
“irrefutable evidence” of divine intervention. It’s hoped that
by adhering to these exacting standards, atheists and agnostics may
be persuaded to return to the Church.
Science today is probabilistic, not
deterministic. The line was crossed in the mid-1770s when Pierre
Simon Laplace observed that the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn showed
a long-term, though very slight, shift that did not fit the
predictions of Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity. Newton himself
thought that divine intervention would be needed to put the planets
back in their proper orbits to prevent the solar system from coming
apart.
Laplace, using the mathematics of probability,
explained these “secular variations,” as they were then called,
within the framework of Newton’s theory of gravity.
Legend has it that when Napoleon asked Laplace
why God was not considered in these secular variations, Laplace
replied: “I have no need of that hypothesis.”
Quantum mechanics and evolutionary biology are
both probabilistic, albeit in mind-boggling timescales, with a
inordinately large role given to luck or chance.
Being a card player, my idea of a secular
miracle would be an event in which four bridge players would each be
dealt a complete suit of cards. Barring fraud, the odds of this
happening are 2, 235, 197, 406, 895, 366, 368, 301, 599, 999 to 1.
The event is not only probable, it’s also measurable. It’s
therefore not a miracle by Benedict’s standards.
If the laws of probability are to be made a part
of the “technical means” for determining a miracle, then there
could not be any miracle that could irrefutably demonstrate divine
intervention. Our inability to explain a marvelous event is due to
ignorance and not to anything else.
Pope John Paul’s idea of a miracle is pitched
to human timescales and does not need to be carried to
implausibility.
Pope Benedict’s criterion of scientific and
mathematical rigor could mean that during his pontificate, there
would not be any blesseds, let alone saints.
Perhaps it’s all to the good. Saints are less
important to the Roman Catholic Church than its moral teachings.
This might be the underlying purpose of Pope
Benedict’s diktat.
mlatimes@gmail.com
|
