The Medical Bureau and the Very Short List

Lourdes attracts the seriously ill, and claims of cure followed immediately. The response was unusual: rather than defend the claims, the sanctuary built a procedure to test them. A medical bureau was established at Lourdes in the nineteenth century, open to any doctor visiting, to document claimed cures and to look for a medical explanation. An international medical committee was later added above it. A claim must be documented before and after, must concern a serious and objectively verifiable condition, and must be unexplained by treatment or by known natural remission. Even then the bureau does not declare anything a miracle. It refers the file to the bishop of the claimant's own diocese, who decides.

Out of many thousands of claims across more than a century and a half, the number formally declared has been very small, and the rate has fallen as diagnostic medicine has improved, which is what one would expect of a filter that eliminates cases with a medical explanation. Critics read the whole exercise as an institution grading its own homework; the counter-argument is that the filter throws out almost everything and is designed to. What is not in dispute is the Church's formal position, which attributes nothing to the water. Popular practice attributes a great deal to it, and the gap between the two is where this object actually lives.