Paris, France - The Roman Catholic pilgrimage shrine at Lourdes will not start churning out cases of divine healings with a new category of faith-based recoveries that do not qualify as miracles, its local bishop said on Thursday.
Bishop Jacques Perrier said last week that Catholicism's leading shrine was considering a new category of healings because modern medicine no longer declares diseases incurable -- a key requirement for a recovery to be declared miraculous.
The new category of "credible testimony" -- dubbed "miracle lite" by critics sceptical about healings at the popular shrine in southwestern France -- will still require doctors to certify a recovery from serious illness was sudden and inexplicable.
Bishop Jacques Perrier said Lourdes, where dozens of people claim to be cured each year after visiting a grotto where the Virgin Mary was said to have appeared in 1858, would probably recognize only a handful of certified healings annually.
"I'd say the average would be about five, something in that order -- it won't be 50," he told journalists in Paris.
The Catholic Church teaches that God sometimes performs miracles including cures doctors cannot explain. Sceptics reject this as unscientific and explain sudden recoveries as psychological phenomena or the delayed result of treatment.
The Church's 18th-century rules on miracles require doctors to attest the ailment could not be remedied otherwise. A local medical bureau and a 25-member medical commission receive many applications for recognition and reject almost all of them.
Lourdes has declared only 67 healings as miraculous since 1858, despite thousands of declarations from pilgrims who left Lourdes freed of their ailments, Perrier said.
"NOT HUNGRY FOR MIRACLES"
Dr Francois-Bernard Michel, co-chairman with Perrier of the Lourdes International Medical Committee that examines healing claims, said medical progress had reduced the Lourdes pilgrimage from a voyage of faith to a yes-or-no question.
"Medicine has progressed more in the past 30 years than in the 300 years before that," said Michel, who is also a professor at Montpellier University medical school.
"Because of the strict rules (for miracles), we have ended up with a very simplistic alternative -- is it a miracle or not? But we doctors are not hungry for miracles. We're not trying to find miracles where there are none or offer discount miracles.
"We must respect both scientific rigour and the faith and conviction of people who, at a precise point in their lives, have experienced a radical change in their health," he said.
Perrier said the new category would not be a second-class miracle but a new way of looking at unexplained recoveries.
"We want to redirect the spotlight," he said. "Now it is on the medical case alone. We want to reorient it to the people involved. Their lives were ruined and now they're well again.
"This takes the whole person into account, not just the isolated medical aspect of the case."
Michel said the International Medical Committee concluded last November that a French woman stricken by malignant lymphoma and leukemia had experienced an "exceptional healing" after visiting Catholicism's leading shrine.
The case of the woman, who has requested anonymity, has not yet received approval as a miracle from the Church, he said.
Perrier said he would discuss his plan with the Vatican but that it did not need approval from Rome to be introduced.