The Miracle Read Online Free PDF Page B

cancelled it, and is off to find a miracle. For me, Father, his decision is suicidal and deeply distressing. Only by having an operation—"
    Father Hearn interrupted her. "Miss Spenser, I have in no way tried to dissuade Mr. Clayton from undergoing an operation. It is not in my province to sit in judgment on a parishioner's desire to seek help from the medical profession. This was a decision Mr. Clayton had to come to himself. When we talked this morning, he had great misgivings about the surgery's being a success. He said that if he underwent an operation now, he'd sacrifice a God-given opportimity to be in Lourdes at the time of the Virgin Mary's visitation. He realized that after his surgery he'd be convalescing, bedridden, and would therefore be unable to pray directly to the Blessed Virgin for a miraculous cure of his possibly fatal illness. Mr. Clayton made his choice on his own. He decided to put his life in the hands of Our Lord and of the Mother of Heaven at a Christian shrine that has provided—constantly provided— miraculous cures to afflicted pilgrims from all over the earth."
    Amanda felt a rush of anger and impatience that transcended her

    control. There was a life at stake, a human life, and this pious poop was trying to disregard it with banalities. "Father Heam, you don't believe all that, do you?"
    Momentarily, the priest was taken aback. "What are you saying— don't believe what?"
    "That this illiterate shepherdess really, in reality, saw the Virgin Mary? Wait, let me finish, let me make myself clear, without being disrespectful in any way. Even assuming that there was a corporeal Virgin Mary, Bernadette would have been a poor choice to see her or report her message. From my reading, the evidence available, what is obvious to me is that Bernadette fits perfectly into the mold of the hysteric. There she was, in this backwater village, a half-starved, always ailing, semi-ignorant peasant girl, a little adolescent hungry for attention and love. She was the ideal type to have hallucinations, to wish for and hence conjure up a beautiful friend like the Virgin Mary, and be convinced that she had actually seen the Holy Mother and conversed with her. Bernadette deluded herself into thinking that she had seen what she claimed to see, and others then and since have been eager to be deluded also, to believe in this, to fulfill their own personal needs." Amanda caught her breath. "Father, do you expect me to put the life of the one person I love more than any other on earth in the hands of an unstable adolescent who lived briefly 130 years ago? Can you actually expect me to believe that Ken, or anyone with a medically determined serious disease, possibly incurable, can be cured by kneeling and praying at some French cave because a simple-minded peasant girl, her head filled with dreams, claimed that she had seen and talked with the Mother of Jesus eighteen times at this spot?"
    Drained, Amanda sat back, hoping that she had resistance enough to weather the storm that she was sure would follow. But, to her surprise. Father Heam displayed no anger. He appeared calm, the figure of reasonableness.
    The tone of his response was quiet and steady. "If the Virgin had not appeared at the grotto, to be seen and heard by a pure and innocent believer, and had not endowed the grotto with special powers, how do you account for the scientific, the medical, facts that have been produced in the decades since? How do you account for the nearly seventy persons who have experienced a miraculous cure of what had been diagnosed by the leading physicians of many nations as an incurable disease? How do you account for the fact that in every one of these terminal cases, the best doctors in the world certified the patient as totally cured, not by medicine but by the power of the miraculous? How

    do you account for five thousand other cases of crippled or dying persons being reported as fully cured because of the grotto in Lourdes?"
    Amanda