Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (56 page)

time Pope, Pius XII, has prompted controversy.

John Paul’s enthusiasm for saint-making in Southern Europe, Africa, and South America, contrasts with a marked lack of new Blesseds and Saints in the Northern hemisphere during the same period. A senior Vatican official I spoke with during the millennium year informed me that, according to John Paul II, ‘North European Catholics don’t believe in sainthood or miracles in the way they used to. So they don’t pray to candidates for sainthood to produce miracles essential for making more saints.’ Normally one approved miracle is required for beatification (the recognition of a local cult), and a second for canonisation (recognition of a universal cult). An example of this lack of Northern miracles, I was assured, was Cardinal Newman. My informant said that John Paul frequently grumbled: ‘I would like to beatify Cardinal Newman, but he won’t do a miracle.’ And the reason he would not, so John Paul believed, was that Catholics in England had not prayed for one.
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NEWMAN ON MIRACLES

The Church of England in Newman’s day was not inclined to endorse miracle claims beyond the death of the last Apostle. So, even before becoming a Catholic, Newman felt obliged to explore and defend Catholic belief in miracles, as a feature of authentic Anglo-Catholicism against the Protestant wing of the Church of England.

When he was a don at Oriel and Vicar of St Mary’s, he appears to have held not so much a sceptical view of miracles outside of Scripture as doubts about the very point of them. ‘In matter of fact, then’, he preached, ‘whatever be the reason, nothing is gained by miracles, nothing comes of miracles, as regards our religious views, principles and habits. Hard as it is to believe, miracles certainly do not make men better; the history of Israel proves it.’
²
Without denying that miracles have ever taken place after the death of the last apostle, he asserts that since everyday life is full of miracles, what need have we of miracles beyond the evident works of God?

Now what truth would a miracle convey to you which you do not learn from the works of God around you? What would it teach you concerning God which you do not already believe without having seen it?
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A summation of Newman’s views on miracles is to be found in the notes to the
Apologia
(see the Ian Ker Penguin edition),
⁴
where Newman explains his position in consequence of Charles Kingsley’s criticisms. Kingsley had accused Newman of ‘irrationality’ for believing that the oil flowing from the bones of Saint Walburga, venerated in Anglo-Saxon times, had performed miracles of healing.

Newman makes a distinction between miracles performed in Apostolic times, and ‘Ecclesiastical Miracles’ performed down the ages by ‘holy’ people. He defends the authenticity of these, later Ecclesiastical miracles according to the logic of analogy: if God over-ruled the laws of nature during Apostolic times, there is surely no reason why He could not, or would not, do so in subsequent times. He makes a distinction between the two, however, which he had clarified in 1851, writing to Samuel Hinds, Bishop of Norwich:

The scripture miracles are credible –
i.e.
provable, on a ground peculiar to themselves, on the authority of God’s word. Observe my expressions: I think it ‘
impossible to withstand the evidence
which is brought for the liquefaction of the blood of St Januarius’. Should I thus speak of the resurrection of Lazarus? – should I say, ‘I think it impossible to
withstand the evidence
for his resurrection?’ … a Catholic would say, ‘I believe it with a certainty beyond all other certainty,
for
God has spoken’.… On the other hand, ecclesiastical miracles may be believed, one more than another, and more or less by different persons.
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As for the incidence of ecclesiastical miracles, Newman’s views coincide precisely with John Paul’s on the reasons for geographical or cultural unevenness

– for example, the absence of miracles in the Protestant North:

Since, generally, they are granted to faith and prayer, therefore in a country in which faith and prayer abound, they will be more likely to occur, than where and when faith and prayer are not; so that their occurrence is irregular.
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But how could and should one discern a miraculous event? Newman declares: ‘Persons … will of necessity, the necessity of good logic, be led to say, first, “It
may
be”, and secondly, “But I must have
good evidence
in order to believe it”.’ He goes on, ‘It
may
be, because miracles take place in all ages; it must be clearly
proved
, because perhaps after all it may be only a providential mercy, or an exaggeration, or a mistake, or an imposture’.

What does Newman mean by proof?

(1) That the event occurred as stated, and is not a false report or an exaggeration. (2) That it is clearly miraculous, and not a mere providence or answer to prayer within the order of nature.

Newman then proceeds to raise the question of science and miracles. ‘I frankly confess that the present advance of science tends to make it probable that various facts take place, and have taken place, in the order of nature, which hitherto have been considered by Catholics as simply supernatural.’ Does this not subvert the capacity to judge a great many alleged miracles as outside ‘the order of nature’ ? He steps, however, beyond the official Vatican criteria for saint and beatus making miracles by insisting that God might well use the laws of

nature to perform a miracle by merely interfering with the sequences of cause and effect:

An event which is possible in the way of nature, is certainly possible too to Divine Power without the sequence of natural cause and effect at all. A conflagration, to take a parallel, may be the work of an incendiary [arsonist], or the result of a flash of lightning; nor would a jury think it safe to find a man guilty of arson, if a dangerous thunderstorm was raging at the very time when the fire broke out … That the Lawgiver always acts through His own laws, is an assumption, of which I never saw a proof. In a given case, then, the possibility of assigning a human cause for an event does not
ipso facto
prove that it is not miraculous.
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Newman goes on to write of the supernatural nature of what he terms ‘providences’ or
grazie
, in other words extraordinary events that may have been the answer to prayer, or God’s mercy or providence, without being clearly against the laws of nature.

Providences or
grazie
, though they do not rise to the order of miracles, yet, if they occur again and again in connexion with the same persons, institutions, or doctrines, may supply a cumulative evidence of the fact of a supernatural presence in the quarter in which they are found.
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For a growing number of Catholics, the criterion of inexplicability underpinning a miracle is unsatisfactory for the reasons already cited by Newman – the shifting nature of explanation in science. A sea change in Catholic attitudes, following Newman’s view, as above, may well be set to challenge the official ‘scientific’ scrutinies in Rome. But an alteration in the rules is unlikely without a battle.

An example of a more inclusive appeal of the miraculous is to be seen in the case of the Blessed Rupert Mayer, a Jesuit persecuted by the Nazis, who died in 1945. For many years in the post-war era there were as many as 8,000 visitors to Mayer’s tomb in Munich on a single day. The Vatican apparently received up to 30,000 letters a year from the faithful with reports of remarkable changes in their lives after visiting his shrine: the jobless finding work, the depressed and suicidal returning to psychological health, broken marriages reconciled, alco-holics cured. But not one of these blessings could be taken as evidence for his beatification process. John Paul did not want to lose the idea that God intervenes directly, tangibly, and subject to ‘proof ’, in answer to prayer.

JACK SULLIVAN’S MIRACLE

One wonders against this background what Newman would have made of the miracle in support of his own beatification. On 29 May 2008 five members of

the 70-strong Consulta Medica, the body of medical experts available to the Congregation for Saints, announced that Mr Jack Sullivan, a 70-year-old Catholic deacon in Boston, Mass., was, in their view, healed in a manner that de-fied natural explanation. Mr Sullivan had been suffering from a serious back condition that threatened eventual paralysis, and caused him debilitating pain. He was obliged to walk virtually doubled-up. On two separate occasions, following two separate episodes of insupportable pain, Jack Sullivan prayed to Newman, and the pain disappeared. In the first instance the alleviation was for several weeks; in the second it was permanent, although this followed an operation that was intended to cure the underlying condition and bring long term relief.‌

The medical scrutineers do not speak of miracles, they state merely that the healing event was ‘immediate, complete, lasting, and inexplicable’. A recommendation on the miraculous nature of the event is then made by a panel of theologians at the Congregation for the Causes of Saints before being passed up to the Pope for his decision. The following account is taken from the ‘
positio
’ on Sullivan’s miracle, the official investigation conducted by the Congregation at the Vatican. The succeeding citations in this chapter are drawn from that document, published by the Holy See in 2008.
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John Sullivan was born on 19 October 1938 and lives at Marshfield, Massachusetts, in the United States. On 6 June 2000 he began to suffer serious and debilitating pain in the back and both legs. He was taken to Jordan Hospital in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and the physician in the Emergency Room ordered a CAT scan. The scan revealed a serious succession of deformities to vertebrae in the lumbar area from L2–L5. His spine was badly ‘herniated’ causing severe ‘stenosis’ (the compression or choking of nerves in the lower back) resulting in pain and weakness in both legs.

There had been no evidence of previous trauma or history of chronic spinal deformity to warrant the condition. The doctor explained to him that the vertebrae and discs were depressed inward so as to intrude upon the spinal canal, squeezing his spinal cord and femoral nerves. He was advised to seek treatment immediately from specialists in Boston.

Sullivan was following a course of instruction in preparation for ordination as a deacon. Without relief from the pain he would be obliged to drop out of the course. On 26 June, he happened to be watching a TV program on Mother Angelica’s EWTN channel on the life of Cardinal Newman. The viewers were asked to contact the Postulator of Newman’s cause for beatification if they had received any ‘divine favours or extraordinary experiences’ resulting from their prayers for Newman’s intercession. The address was posted on the screen. Sullivan says: ‘In my anxiety over the prospect of losing my vocation [to the diaconate], I then felt a strong compulsion to pray to Cardinal Newman with all my

heart.’ Sullivan says that he made the following prayer: ‘Please help me to somehow get back to classes and be ordained.’
¹⁰
He adds that he did not pray particularly for healing but for greater persistence and courage that was evident in Newman’s life. ‘Immediately after my prayer’, he reports, ‘I suddenly experienced a new and uplifting sense of trust and confidence. I knew something would hap-pen as a result of my supplications.’

The next morning he got out of bed virtually pain free and began to walk without difficulty, whereas the day before he had been hunched over, having to place his right hand on his right knee to support himself when attempting to walk. ‘The joy of that first moment filled my heart with gratitude for Cardinal Newman’s intercession with God.’