Miracles don’t often make the New York Times. The Gray Lady was reluctant to release stories about verified UFO cases, for crying out loud. But the story about a twenty-first century saint made me pause. Well, Carlo Acutis isn’t technically a saint yet (at least he wasn’t at the time of the story), but you can’t become a saint without miracles. Miracles are difficult situations for which to set up a control group. Often they involve human beings and we really don’t understand ourselves well enough to say what might be supernatural from time to time. All we know, at least from the “educated” establishment, is that materialism accounts for everything so miracles don’t happen. QED. That’s why I found the account of Carlo Acutis so interesting. A story about a young person dying from leukemia is always sad, but this report doesn’t end there.
In his brief life, Acutis tried to bring good into the world via the internet. In this shadowy realm where trolls and hatred thrive, here was a young man trying to spread positive things through this collective of anybody who can afford connectivity. That does make a remarkable news story in and of itself, but that miracle. Two, in fact. Catholic practice is not to assign sainthood without out two very carefully studied miracles. The Vatican has been involved with science for many decades. The idea of the Big Bang, after all, derived from Georges Lemaître, a Catholic priest and physicist. Controls are set up for miracles, and the church even used to use Devil’s advocates to try to disprove miracles in such cases. Skepticism was an essential part of the process. In its own way this is the scientific study of miracles.
The miracle that may put Acutis over the top, according to the Times, is a spontaneous remission of a brain hemorrhage after a prayer was made to the young man. Such things happen and doctors can’t explain them. We as human beings have no way to determine what actually causes such unconventional healings—miracles—often deemed impossible by medical science. A saint is as good an explanation as any other. What’s fascinating here is that this miraculous recovery in all likelihood would’ve been overlooked by the New York Times, had it not been for this pending sainthood case. Such cases as this aren’t everyday occurrences, but they reflect realities that modern people may be very slow to acknowledge. They still do happen, whether they make the papers or not. Perhaps our world would be a bit better if they did get reported a little more often.
