Lourdes: The 70th recognized miracle

French Bishop Jacques Benoit-Gonin of Beauvais declared that the recovery a long-debilitated nun made after she visited Lourdes was a miracle—the 70th event to be recognized as an act of divine intervention at the shrine. He proclaimed the miracle nearly a decade after Bernadette Moriau, born on September 23, 1939 in northern France, attended a blessing of the sick ceremony at the Lourdes Shrine on July 11, 2008.

Moriau’s experience underwent extensive studies and tests by the International Medical Committee of Lourdes. She had four operations on her spinal column between 1968 and 1975 and was declared fully disabled in 1980. “I never asked for a miracle,” the nun, now 79, recounted of her July 2008 pilgrimage to Lourdes.

After returning to her home convent and praying in the chapel, “I felt a surge of well-being throughout my body, a relaxation, warmth…” she said. Moriau said she immediately did away with all her aids, from braces to morphine.

The bishop said the nun’s “sudden, instantaneous, complete and durable change” alerted him to a possible miracle. The Lourdes medical committee said the changes were unexplainable “in the current state of our scientific knowledge,” he added.

Adapted from The Catholic Herald