The Catholic Church plans to make Cardinal Newman a saint when the Pope comes to Britain. A private Vatican document supposedly proves he was responsible for a miracle of healing. It shows no such thing.Not so long ago, a rare kind of book came into my hands: a Vatican investigation into an alleged supernatural event.
It is sumptuously bound in scarlet cloth, and the gilt- lettered title proclaims in Latin: “Positio Super Miro” (”A Statement on the Miracle”).
This volume, running to 240 pages, contains the final judgment of a panel known as the Consulta Medica (more popularly, “the Miracle Police”) into the supernatural claims of one Jack Sullivan, an elderly American deacon, formerly a court official in Massachusetts.
Sullivan is convinced that he was cured nine years ago of a severe spinal condition as a result of praying to Cardinal John Henry Newman, a Victorian convert from Anglicanism to Catholicism who died in 1890.
Only after the Pope pronounces that a healing is indeed a miracle can a positio be read outside the bureaucratic circles of the saint-makers in Rome.
The Pope recently ratified Sullivan’s healing as an authentic supernatural event, so the positio on his case has just been made available to a handful of bona-fide researchers with a specialist interest in Newman.
Copies will be kept in the Vatican library and at Newman’s oratory in Birmingham.
This is a story of how the Catholic Church makes saints, how popes authenticate miracles, and how a volatile mix of science and the supernatural could upset an imminent papal visit.
Pope Benedict is coming to Britain to perform a religious ceremony known as a beatification.
On Saturday, September 18, in the presence of a vast congregation at Coventry airport, he will decree Cardinal Newman to be a “blessed” (the final stage to full sainthood). This makes it official that he was a man of heroic holiness who went straight to heaven, and has scope to intercede with God to perform miracles for those who petition him on Earth. It is an honour to which Newman himself never aspired. Indeed he was strongly opposed to the notion of his own beatification.
Newman shocked the Anglican world when he abandoned his church in 1845 to embrace what Protestants called “the Whore of Babylon” — the Church of Rome. His autobiography, Apologia pro Vita Sua (An Apology for His Life), is a spiritual classic. He is celebrated throughout the English-speaking world, and especially North America, as the greatest Catholic thinker of modern times.
According to Vatican saint-making rules, the person to be beatified, or made a “blessed”, must literally prove his or her influence with God by persuading the Almighty to perform just one “testable” miracle.
The positiones contain all the scientific evidence for the “inexplicable” nature of the miracle, and the Pope bases his verdict on their findings. But a close study of the Sullivan positio reveals that the Pope has not adhered to the Vatican’s own strict standards for validating miracles.
The evidence for Sullivan’s miracle also contradicts the opinions of at least three leading medical specialists: the consultant neurosurgeons Michael Powell of the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in London and Helen Fernandez of Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge; and the clinical psychologist Professor Irving Kirsch of Hull University, who studies placebo effects.
When Benedict XVI arrives in Britain in September, groups of activists are set to voice a catalogue of anti-papal grievances, including his perceived interference in Britain’s equality laws, and his attempt to woo Anglican priests en masse from the Church of England.
Gay activists have vowed to protest against his condemnation of homosexuality, while there is talk of a “legal ambush” to arrest him for alleged cover-ups of priestly paedophiles.
During the election campaign, the leaders of Britain’s three main parties all disagreed with the Pope on homosexuality, contraception and human embryonic stem-cell research.
And now Benedict’s visit — of which the beatification of Newman was to be the central focus — looks bound for a theological as well as political storm.
The positio tells the story of Newman’s miracle with ample quotes from interviews with Sullivan and his doctors.
On June 6, 2000, Jack Sullivan, a 61-year-old resident of Marshfield, near Boston, suffered severe pain in his lower back. A scan revealed deformities to vertebrae in the lumbar area. His spine was herniated, causing severe stenosis (narrowing of the spinal canal and compression of nerves in the lower back).
The vertebrae and discs were depressed inward so as to intrude on the spinal canal, squeezing his spinal cord and femoral nerves.
Sullivan was studying, late in his life, to become a Catholic minister: a deacon, the stage below full priesthood. Without relief from the pain, he could not have continued his courses. On June 26, he was watching a Catholic TV programme on Cardinal Newman.
Viewers were asked to write in if they believed they had received any “divine favours or extraordinary experiences” resulting from their prayers to Newman.
Sullivan told the Miracle Police: “I then felt a strong compulsion to pray to Cardinal Newman with all my heart.”
Next morning, the pain had gone, and he could walk upright without difficulty. “The joy of that first moment filled my heart with gratitude for Cardinal Newman’s intercession with God,” he recollected.
However, on examination, it was discovered that the underlying physiological condition had not been cured. He was referred to a Dr Robert Banco, a spinal-cord surgeon, who advised a “wait and see” policy.
Sullivan continued his studies for 10 pain-free months. But the pain returned in May 2001, and Banco recommended a laminectomy (surgery to relieve pressure on nerves in the spine) which was successfully performed on August 9.
The doctor explained that the lower spine had been badly ruptured and there was significant tearing of the dura mater (the membrane surrounding the spinal cord and housing protective fluids).
The fluids had leaked out, causing the protruding bony areas to rub against the spinal cord.
Banco told the Vatican investigators that he believed it a “miracle itself” that Sullivan had been pain-free for the earlier 10-month period and that he had been capable of walking.
He told Sullivan: “I have absolutely no medical explanation to give you as to why your pain stopped. The MRI and subsequent surgery bear out the severity of your condition... If you want an answer, ask God.” Dr Banco is a Catholic.
After the operation, Sullivan was in great pain and unable to walk. Recovery, even from a successful operation, can take time — according to experts, from a few days to a few months. Six days after the operation, he prayed again to Cardinal Newman.
“I felt a very warm sensation all over my body,” he recalls, “and a sense of real peace and joy came over me... Then I felt a surge of strength and confidence that I could finally walk.”
As of this month, May 2010, he has had no recurrence of pain and walks normally.
Dr Banco has testified that Sullivan’s recovery was “unbelievable, 100%, totally remarkable!” “I have never seen a healing process occur so quickly and completely.”
Sullivan says that his surgeon had told him the pain and difficulty with walking could have lasted three months or more.
Banco wrote to Sullivan: “I have been in practice for 15 years and have seen many cases similar to your case. I have treated probably over 1,500 patients with spinal stenosis. Your lack of pain pre-operatively for that time period as well as your postoperative recovery were truly miraculous, in my opinion.”
In its conclusions, the positio enters the realms of astonishingly arcane medieval language and mindset.
A miracle may involve the suspension of nature in one of three ways: by means of the substance, quoad substantiam, such as a raising from the dead; or from the fact, quoad subiectum, such as a reconstitution of organs (”restitutio in integrum”); or, as the positio proclaims, by matter of degree, quoad modum.
Which means that the Vatican medical panel is insisting that Sullivan recovered more speedily from the operation than was expected.
Finally (in Italian): “The judgment of non-explainability refers exclusively to the immediate recovery of postoperative function, absolutely not foreseen in the specific case.”
Beyond the stilted language, however, lie sacrosanct criteria. Professor Franco De Rosa, an internal-medicine specialist at Rome University’s medical school, has advised the Vatican as a member of the Consulta Medica for many years. He told me that anything smacking of “autosuggestion, hypnosis, psychology” is immediately discarded.
“As soon as a case comes before us,” he said, “I do a Medline search, a worldwide internet survey of the latest articles on the specific disease or trauma, to establish the prognosis, potential treatment, citations of remission. If the cure clearly defies the explanations of current medical science, and there is no history of remission, then we deem it inexplicable.”
He set out the strict, non-negotiable criteria for inexplicability.
“It must be a serious problem, obviously,” he told me, “not something trivial. And we have to be satisfied that effective treatment has not been applied. We have to be convinced that the cure is sudden, or at least a matter of a few days or weeks rather than months or years. Finally, we have to know that the cure is permanent: that there has been no relapse.”
The relief of pain in June 2000 was not permanent, and so forms no part of the miracle claim, however inexplicable Sullivan’s personal specialist thought it to be.
As we have seen, the underlying physical condition, his stenosis, was rectified by the laminectomy operation of August 2001.
The potentially “miraculous” aspect of the case, then, as the conclusion to the positio acknowledges, was the speedy relief of pain after the operation.
Yet the strict rules as explained by Professor De Rosa insist that any claim involving an “effective treatment” — which would include a laminectomy — be dismissed out of hand.
Totally absent from the investigators’ notes in the positio, moreover, is an independent expert view remote from the supernatural and the Vatican ambit. Since Sullivan’s case hinges on relief of his pain and return of function within nine days of the operation, I consulted three appropriate leading clinical figures in the fields of laminectomy surgery and pain relief, providing them with detailed abstracts of the material in the positio.
Since 1985, Mr Michael Powell has been consultant neurosurgeon at University College Hospital and the National, Queen Square, in London. He is also chairman of Britain’s Specialist Advisory Committee in Neurosurgery.
“The complications this man suffered from,” he informed me, “are classic, but generally relatively infrequent. They include tearing the dura mater, membrane, which is the watertight sheath around the spine and brain, which leads to a leak of spinal fluid from the wound, and of course nerve damage from direct trauma to the nerve roots by surgical instruments. Fortunately, complete paralysis, which can occur from retained blood clots and so forth, is extremely rare.”
The “lumbar canal stenosis” which was the problem, he went on, “is a commonly treated neurosurgical condition.”
It results in pain in the legs when walking and standing and, unusually, when at rest as well. “It is caused by degeneration in the intervertebral discs and facet joints, typically at lumbar levels 4-5 and to a lesser extent, but still commonly, at 3-4.”
Laminectomy, or lumbar decompressive surgery, is an operation, according to Powell, “that we start our surgical trainees on, as it is essentially quite easy and has a good outcome in the majority of cases.”
He adds that “we would hardly start our trainees on it if it were difficult, and most UK neurosurgical trainees at certification at the end of training have done in the region of 70 to 80 such cases”.
Mr Powell claimed that the operation usually takes him “about 40 minutes, and most patients, even my most recent, who is aged 88, walk out happy at two days... There are many excellent surgeons in the US, but for the majority, speed is not essential, unlike in the good old NHS”.
On the sudden relief of pre-operative and postoperative pain, Powell noted that “since the capacity of the spinal canal can be increased by simple measures, such as forward curving of the spine which is achieved by... bending over a supermarket shopping trolley or good physiotherapy, relief can be fairly quick from these conservative means”. He argued that relieving a patient of tension could easily have the same effect: “I have certainly seen patients with appalling MRIs have complete relief for a significant period from a variety of unusual measures — relaxing holidays in warm places can work wonders.”
Although he declined to comment on the effect of prayer, his remarks indicate that relaxation and easing of tension, which often result from prayer and meditation, could explain Sullivan’s sudden release from pain both pre-operatively and postoperatively.
Professor Irving Kirsch, a clinical psychologist at Hull University, has studied placebo effects in thousands of clinical trials over the past two decades. He argues that “blocking pain despite continued physical pathology does seem more like a placebo effect than a miracle”.
This would certainly explain Sullivan’s alleviation of pain in both 2000 and 2001. As can be found on many specialist medical sites, including Medline, there is a huge literature on nerve-pain remission through self-hypnosis, relaxation and altered states of mind.
“For generations, beginning in the mid-19th century, the ability to block pain with hypnosis,” he says, “is even seen where surgery has been performed with no anaesthetic except the suggestion that no pain will be felt.”
Mrs Fernandez, consultant neurosurgeon at Addenbrooke’s teaching hospital in Cambridge, comments: “Spinal stenosis is a common condition I treat a lot. Spontaneous improvement, usually short-lived, is not uncommon. I have from time to time cancelled surgery in patients who have had an improvement in symptoms. They generally return some time later, but not always. Improvement is expected in 60-70% of patients, and if the result is good, patients often describe a ‘new lease of life’. Full recovery from surgery with full improvement can take some time.”
Powell has the final word on Sullivan’s recuperation just days after his operation. “Pain is subjective,” he insists.
“A motivated patient will leave the next day on minimal analgesics, but a sufferer can refuse to mobilise and be in hospital for over a week. I had another patient recently who refused to get out of bed, and gobbled opiates prescribed by the acute pain team till she went unconscious, for exactly the same op as my motivated 88-year-old.”
Asked if Sullivan’s relief might just possibly have been a miracle, he replied: “To us here [at this hospital], Sullivan’s story is not surprising, other than the claim of a miracle, that is. I am afraid I have had a good chuckle with spine surgeons here over that one.”
There are Catholics who fail to see the funny side of appropriating miracles to prove a person’s holiness.
Clifford Longley, senior columnist and leader writer on the Catholic weekly The Tablet, is scathing: “The idea that God would demonstrate that a saint is truly in heaven by instantly healing someone’s fatal illness because he has been petitioned by the said saint — who is in turn responding to the petitions of the sufferer or those near to him — seems to me so simplistic, so credulous, so presumptuous, so mechanical and so manipulative, that it brings no credit to the Catholic religion and indeed confirms the worst prejudices of its enemies.”
Scientists argue that scientific explanations depend on current theories in science, which are valid only until falsified or proven otherwise. Highly placed Jesuits in Rome have long pressed the Vatican to abandon its quest for scientifically “tested” physical miracles and to look for “moral” and “spiritual” ones — the power of prayer to heal bereavement or cure an alcoholic or a drug-taker.
They argue that it is more difficult to heal a hardened or broken heart than to cure a physical illness. But Benedict XVI, like his predecessor, John Paul II, is having none of it. The papal role as final adjudicator of the scientifically tested supernatural must stay.
Cardinal Newman would have vehemently opposed the popes on the issue. He argued that the faithful should be prepared to accept that miracles occur within nature, not outside it. He preached, in any case, that “nothing is gained by miracles, nothing comes of miracles, as regards our religious views, principles and habits. Hard as it is to believe, miracles certainly do not make men better”.
The final irony is that Newman himself was utterly opposed to the idea of his own beatification.
To thwart attempts to make a cult of his remains, he ordered that he be buried in a rich compost so that his corpse would decompose rapidly — an action that cheated the saint-makers.
When the clerical gravediggers attempted an exhumation to retrieve his relics in October 2008, they found nothing except the coffin’s brass plate and handles.
Benedict and the traditionalist wing of Catholicism nevertheless claim Newman as a faithful supporter of the papal “magisterium” — pontifical dogmas on a raft of issues.
When addressing Britain’s bishops three months ago, the Pope cited Newman as an enemy to Catholic dissidence in any shape or form.
As the Pope prepares for his visit to the UK, he is clearly bent on sanitising Newman’s progressive Catholicism in preparation for the beatification.
But Newman was certainly a dissident when it came to overbearing papal authority, creeping infallibility, the downgrading of the laity, the primacy of papal dogma over individual conscience.
He wrote of an ageing pope: “He becomes a god, has no one to contradict him, does not know facts, and does cruel things without meaning it.”
If Newman is in heaven, as all Catholics surely believe, he is likely to be exerting his influence with the Almighty — not to produce miracles, but to stop his own transmogrification into an official plaster saint.
He once wrote: “I have no tendency to be a saint — it is a sad thing to say so. Saints are not literary men...” Newman knew his own conscience, and he knew the difference between a saint and sinner. He was also secure in his priorities.
“I shall drink to the Pope if you please,” he once wrote, “... still to conscience first and the Pope afterwards.”
If Pope Benedict makes it to England in September, he is unlikely to preach to that text.
John Cornwell. Newman’s Unquiet Grave: Portrait of a Reluctant Saint, by John Cornwell, is published by Continuum on May 31 at £18.99.SIC: TOUK