Pope’s Low Bar for Miracles

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


For an organization that doesn’t believe condoms stop HIV infection, the Catholic Church has a mighty low bar for proof when it comes to miracles. The 2001 healing of a Boston man in his sixties named Jack Sullivan was deemed “miraculous” last year by the Vatican, reports the BBC. The catch? The man’s recovery was par for the course for the surgery he had.

A panel of Vatican medical experts took eight years to miracle-ify Sullivan’s recovery from back surgery. But what they didn’t consider, or didn’t consider significant, is that Sullivan’s recuperation took the same route as most other patients’ who had the surgery. Sullivan was training to be a deacon when he was debilitated by back pain: his doctor recommended surgery. Sullivan’s surgery went smoothly but his doctor advised him that recovery might take months. A few days after the surgery, Sullivan tried to stand and said “I felt an intense heat, like an oven blast, and a strong tingling sensation throughout my whole body… I felt an indescribable sense of joy and peace, and was totally transfixed by what I believed to be God’s presence… When I became aware of what was happening around me I was standing upright and I exclaimed to the nurse that I felt no more pain.”

Sullivan was transfixed, but secular sources were less than ebullient. The BBC quotes a doctor from a London hospital as saying that a typical surgery like Sullivan’s took “about 40 minutes, and most patients… walk out happy at two days.” The Mayo Clinic’s site says patients may go home the same day as their surgery, “although in some cases a hospital stay of one to three days may be necessary following” the procedure. It was due to Sullivan’s “miraculous” cure following surgery that 19th century cardinal John Henry Newman was beatified over the weekend in England. Sullivan’s was the first miracle of two needed to make Newman a saint. Too bad one of Newman’s miracles’ can’t be curing someone of AIDS, especially in countries like South Africa where 25% of all pregnant mothers have HIV. According to the Vatican, condoms only exacerbate the African HIV/AIDS crisis, despite reducing new infections by 80 percent. A Boston man recovering from back surgery in a few days is ordinary. The Vatican reversing its position on condom use in Africa: that would be a miracle.

WE'LL BE BLUNT:

We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't find elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't find elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate