Lourdes: There is something inexplicable

There are thousands of “inexplicable healings” reported every year at the Marian shrine in Lourdes, France, one of the most visited shrines in the world. However, only very few of these “healings” are ruled “miraculous” by the Church, because the criteria for recognizing a miracle are extremely rigorous.

Many people reject the whole idea of miracles, unaware of the rigor of the Church’s scientific investigation and their outcomes, since the Church validates only a few and rejects thousands of “apparent miracles” presented for examination. For many people, the concept of “miracle” is just the talk of charlatans, lacking any scientific basis.

This attitude of certain “intellectuals” is in stark contrast with the open and respectful mind of some prestigious scientists, such as the French professor Luc Montagnier, a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Medicine (2008), who among his various achievements, is credited with discovering HIV.

A former director of the Pasteur Institute, this eminent scientist offered his opinion on the Lourdes miracles in a book title Le Nobel et le Moine (The Nobel Laureate and the Monk), in which he dialogues with the Cistercian monk Michel Niassaut.

When the conversation turns to the inexplicable healings in Lourdes and Brother Michel asks the professor his opinion as a non-believer, Montagnier responds: “When a phenomenon is inexplicable, if it really exists, then there’s no reason to deny it.”

If the phenomenon exists, what’s the point in denying it? It should be studied, not denied. Montagnier affirms that “in the miracles of Lourdes, there is something inexplicable,” and he rejects the position held by some scientists, who “commit the error of rejecting what they don’t understand. I don’t like this attitude. I frequently quote the astrophysicist Carl Sagan, who said: ‘The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.’”

Montagnier adds, “As far as the miracles of Lourdes are concerned that I’ve studied, I believe they are truly inexplicable.”

“I don’t have an explanation for these miracles,” he says, “and I admit that there are healings that go beyond the current limits of science.”

Translated and adapted from an Aleteia Spanish excerpt from Religión en Libertad.