2023-08-14 19:00:06
“I am, to my knowledge, the only doctor who receives cured patients”, laughs Dr. Alessandro de Franciscis, president of the Office of Medical Findings of Lourdes. Despite the lightness of tone, the procedure for recognizing the miracle is serious and complex. It rests, as the sociologist Laetitia Ogorzelec writes (The Miracle and the Inquiry. Unexplained healings put to the test of medicinePUF, 2014), on a “division of labor between clerics and doctors” and revolves around three phases.
Doctor Alessandro de Franciscis, permanent doctor and president of the Medical Findings Office, in Lourdes, in November 2017. LAURENT FERRIERE / HANS LUCAS VIA AFP
From Doctors to Bishop
During the first, a permanent doctor, appointed by the bishop, forms, with all the doctors present at the sanctuary, the Medical Findings Office. Before asking the question of recovery, he begins by verifying whether the patients who claim to be cured were really ill, relying in particular on their medical records (hospitalization certificates, etc.). He then seeks to establish whether the healing is real and conforms to the seven conditions required by the Church: healing “of a specific disease with a serious prognosis” must be “sudden, instantaneous, complete, lasting, unexplained in the current state of scientific knowledge and not involving convalescence”. To do this, medical examinations are necessary at intervals of several years.
If these conditions are met, the file passes, during the second phase, before the International Medical Committee of Lourdes (CMIL), a higher advisory body founded after the Second World War. It is made up of around thirty doctors and permanent researchers who meet once a year in Paris and are responsible for confirming or not the conclusions of the Office of Medical Findings.
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The third phase marks the exit from the medical field. The file is transmitted to the bishop of the place of the “healed” person who, assisted by a diocesan canonical commission, determines whether – with regard to faith – the healing can be declared miraculous. In short, the miracle is organized as follows: the Medical Office notes the cure, the CMIL confirms it and the bishop recognizes its miraculous character.
Seventy recognized miracles
“I insist on the distinction between religious and medical, because in Lourdes, we talk about organic cures. We have no interest in producing these events, we are here to see the reality of them” : Doctor Alessandro de Franciscis thus underlines the strictly scientific dimension of his work. Does the fact that he is Catholic, like the majority of the doctors of the Office of Medical Findings since its creation in 1883, call into question the objectivity of the diagnoses? Many, like Emile Zola (1840-1902) or the writer Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907), thought it and still think it.
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