About Miracles

Beyond their sensational value, the cures and miracles witnessed in Lourdes are intrinsically a sign of God and an evangelical experience.

From the time of the apparitions to date the Church has recognized 72 miracles resulting from the intervention of God with the intercession of Our Lady of Lourdes.

The other sign of God evident at Lourdes, as important as the miracles and far more frequent, is the sign of Grace which may be seen in the conversions, the serenity of the spirit and the changing of lives.

Why did Jesus perform miracles?

While the Greco-Roman mythology was plentiful of “magical” events, the Gospels were more sober. Nonetheless Jesus performed miracles in response to the faith of those who turned to Him, and in response to His compassion to those who suffer. Jesus heals, calms the storm, and feeds the crowd by His own authority. In doing so, He reveals who He is.

The blind can now see

In the Gospel, the miracles always have two dimensions: the physical and the spiritual. To see, hear or walk again in the physical world are miracles that heal the body. However, more powerful miracles, not always as spectacular to the naked eyes, yet more frequent, are those that open one’s heart to the message of Love from Jesus.

The official criteria of a miraculous cure

The Catholic Church establishes a two-step process. In the first step of the process the cure must pass the following criteria:

cannot be referred to any scientific explanation
was unexpected and thorough
was lasting in time

The case is analyzed by a panel of five doctors, selected from 100 renowned physicians that are members of the “Consulta Medica”, a board established by the Vatican in the mid-1900’s. If three of the five agree that the hand of God has prevailed where science faltered, then the case is sent to a panel of cardinals and priests. If evidence of healing prayer exists, the cure is declared a miracle by the Catholic Church.

Click here for more information about the process.

Are there still miracles today?

Medicine has made a lot of scientific progress since the first apparition at Lourdes, being very effective at curing the physical aspects of the human body. With the advance of medical research, recognition of physical miracles endures a progressively more rigorous criteria. Fewer than in the past, there are still miraculous cures being recognized at the present time.

Bureau des Constatations Médicales

At Lourdes, the first miracles took place after the apparitions of the Virgin Mary to Bernadette in 1858. Since then, thousands of declarations of cures have been collected by an institution that is unique in the world: the “Bureau des Constatations Médicales”.

The bureau was founded in 1883. It counts with the permanent presence of a doctor in charge of noting, verifying and investigating cases of supposed cures.

More than 7,000 cases of healing have been reported.
72 cases have been recognized as miraculous by the Church so far.
More than 80% of the cures concern women.
The youngest person was 2 years old.
Six people claim to have been cured by the intercession of Our Lady of Lourdes while they had not come to Lourdes.
Most of the people were healed by contact with Lourdes water (50), most of them at the Sanctuary’s baths.

The countries of origin of the cures are:

France: 56

Italy: 8

Belgium: 3

Germany: 1

Austria: 1

Switzerland: 1

Declaration of a Miracle

The permanent doctor of the Medical Bureau of Lourdes receives the people who wish to declare a cure. If he considers the case to be serious and worthy of further investigation, he will call in his fellow doctors and carers who are present at Lourdes on that day and who have registered their presence at the Medical Bureau of the Sanctuary.

If the doctors collectively decide to continue the investigation, the cure is then subject to a long research process, which may last several years, and at the end of which the members of the International Medical Committee of Lourdes (CMIL) vote that the cure is “unexplained in the present state of our knowledge”.

The result of the CMIL vote is then reported to the bishop of the cured person’s place of residence. It is then up to the bishop, as the representative of the Church hierarchy, to decide whether to declare a miracle.

The doctors’ work and voting must meet a set of 7 criteria:

The disease is serious, with an unfavorable prognosis.
The disease must be known and recorded by medicine.
The disease must be organic, lesional, that is to say, there must be objective, biological, radiological criteria, everything that currently exists in medicine; this means that even today we will not recognize cures of pathologies without precise objective criteria, such as psychological, psychiatric, functional, nervous diseases, etc. (this does not mean that these diseases cannot be cured, but according to the criteria of the Church, they will not be recognized as miracles in the current state of affairs).
There must not have been any treatment to which the cure could be attributed.
Cure must be sudden, instantaneous, immediate and without convalescence.
The cure must not simply be a regression of symptoms but a return of all vital functions
The cure must be lasting and definitive.

The miracles

There are a total of 72 recognized. Seven of them were recognized in 1862 and 33 around 1908. None were acknowledged from 1908 to 1946, the period around the two World Wars.

Below is a list of all cures since the apparition of Our Lady to Bernadette. The date in each picture is the date of the recognition, not the date of the cure. Half of them were under 30 years of age at the time of their healing.