Fly Vatican Airlines for a Lourdes miracle

Last year Pope Benedict gave Catholics a special time-limited promotional offer: if they visited Lourdes during 2008, they would get a free plenary indulgence that would get them early release from Purgatory, and get them faster to heaven, after they died.

This unsubstantiated sales pitch for Lourdes is not an extreme example of primitive cultist belief. Encouraging seriously sick people to travel great distances, in the hope of a miracle cure, is very much part of mainstream Catholic practice.

Did I say that, just a few months before this special offer, the Vatican had started its own official airline, with the launch slogan ‘I’m Searching for Your Face, Lord’, and Vatican logos on the headrests and air hostess’s uniforms?

Or that the inaugural flight just happened to travel to Lourdes? Or that they now offer thirty tour packages to Catholic pilgrims, including a blockbuster $3,000 tour to Rome, Fatima, Lourdes and Spain?

The Miraculous Business of Lourdes

Lourdes is big business. About five million people travel there every year, and it has more hotels than anywhere else in France except Paris.

And all because, 150 years earlier, fourteen-year-old Bernadette Soubirous was one of a spate of French and Spanish children who claimed to have seen the virgin mother of the Catholic god.

In Bernadette’s case, she thought she saw a small young lady, standing on a niche in a rock, wearing a white veil and blue sash, with a yellow rose on each foot, holding a set of rosary beads. Within a year, people were claiming to have been cured of illnesses at Lourdes, and in 1862 the Catholic Church officially recognized seven of these cures as being miracles.

Since then the Church has added another sixty alleged miracles to the list.

For those who believe this, the virgin mother of their god seems to have paced her interventions somewhat randomly: seven cures in 1858 alone, then none until she cured a fractured leg in 1875, a leisurely four in the next 15 years, then a feast of 27 cures in 21 years, followed by a famine of just two in 36 years, then a steady 22 cures in the next 23 years.

Since 1960, the virgin mother has cured only four people in almost half a century, and she seems to have vanished in the twenty years since 1987, her strike rate coincidentally dropping as medical science is improving.

What type of people are cured at Lourdes?

She seems to have cured mostly younger people, who are arguably more capable of being healed naturally anyway. Half were under thirty, the youngest a baby suffering from malnutrition, three-quarters were under forty, and since 1950 she has cured only one person aged over fifty.

Also of interest is the sequence in which the Church has officially recognized the 67 cures. They started with seven in 1862, added 32 more in a flurry of activity from 1907 to 1913, then seemed to forget about it for thirty years, added 24 more from 1946-1965, but just five in the last forty years.

In the same pattern as the alleged cures themselves, the Church is recognizing less of them as being miracles as medical science is improving.

Unethical behaviour exploiting vulnerable people

Just to be clear, I believe that everyone has right to believe whatever they want to believe, however absurd those beliefs may seem to others. However, when those beliefs cause people to behave in way that unfairly exploits vulnerable people, then others have a right to challenge them to justify that behavior, and to justify the underlying beliefs.

I believe that it is unethical, in the early twenty-first century, that wealthy organizations like the Catholic Church can promote commercial ventures using unsubstantiated sales pitches like these.

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