Two former Popes, John XXIII and John Paul II,
became official Catholic saints on Sunday.
And it's really incredible how little it takes for popes to become saints now.
It used to be that you had to perform two "verified" miracles.
First of all, do you know how many verified miracles there actually are? Zero. There are zero miracles that have actually been verified.
There may be things that we don't have good medical explanations for,
but it doesn't mean a pope magically intervened.
"Miracle" is just a fancy word for "shit we can't explain."
And plenty of doctors have even challenged some of the supposed miracles,
saying there are natural explanations for them if only
the Vatican would give it a second look.
All that said, let's take a look at the miracles attributed to these former popes
and see how magical they really are.
In the case of John XXIII,
they're making him a saint based off of only one miracle,
because two would be ridiculous.
But that one miracle happened in the 1960s.
That's when Sister Catarina Capitano
was cured of gastrointestinal hemorrhaging. She was basically bleeding from her stomach.
Her story goes like this:
She was praying to the Holy Virgin of Pompei,
but it wasn't working. So, the sisters in her convent
took an image of Pope John XXIII and they put it on her nightstand.
Guess what. Nothing happened. She was still sick.
Eventually, though, when she started praying to that pope,
she got better,
but only for two weeks.
That's when she started vomiting. So, she had to go back into the hospital.
But this time, one of her sisters brought her a piece of the sheet
that the pope had died on, because he had died at this point.
And she took that sheet and she placed it against her stomach from where she was bleeding,
and guess what. One night, she felt kind of pressure on her stomach.
And she said the pope was there.
The Pope was basically pressuring,
putting his hand on the stomach, telling her things would get better.
And by the way,
the Pope in her dream looked miraculously like the Pope's image that was on her nightstand.
Who'd have thunk?
And then, when she got up, turns out she felt better.
And all the hemorrhaging has stopped.
And no one could explain how this had happened.
Mind you, maybe the medical advances have gotten a lot better since that time.
We don't have any before or after pictures of any scars that were on her body.
There might be natural explanations we just can't understand.
But based off of that story alone, that was enough to make
Pope John XXIII into a saint.
For Pope John Paul II,
one of his miracles involved curing a woman who was about to have an aneurysm.
She saw him on TV and she prayed to him.
And all of a sudden she got better.
Because miracles can be transmitted through the television now.
And Pope John clearly had something to do with the woman who saw him on TV and then prayed to him.
It's like he totally knew that was happening.
His other miracle
is that he supposedly cured a French woman of Parkinson's disease.
And it turns out that disease can go into remission.
But no, no, no. Let's not change the story. Pope John Paul II cures Parkinson's.
That's the story and the Church is sticking with it.
If you really want to pin a miracle on Pope John Paul II,
maybe we should start with the fact
that the Catholic Church didn't collapse under the weight of all the sex scandals that were taking place under his watch, because
that's a miracle.
The whole ritual of finding miracles
is basically the Church grasping at straws.
And honestly, it just cheapens the very idea of what a miracle is
and how it happens.
So, why do they do this in the first place?
I know this sounds selfish, but it is basically a PR campaign for the Church.
When your country produces someone who becomes a saint,
it makes Catholicism look pretty good in that country. The number of people who go to church starts going up.
It's like your country has produced the hometown hero.
It puts people back in the pews.
And it puts the church back in the news.
But this whole process of turning these people into saints,
it just underscores one of the big problems atheists like me have with faith in the first place.
Sainthood is nothing but a prolonged God-of-the-gaps argument:
When we don't understand how something works,
we're not going to go looking for a natural explanation, we are just going to assume is a miracle.
That's the wrong way to look at things that we don't understand.
And it's something I want to look more into to see if there might be a scientific explanation.
Unfortunately, the Church doesn't want to do that. They just want to jump to... Miracle!
My name is Hemant Mehta and I write at FriendlyAtheist.com
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