This post will articulate the final eight of fourteen principles that I think underlie the Catholic environmental vision. Part one ended on the thought that the first six principles imply a positive and optimistic attitude toward the natural world, the creator, and the human race.

Principle seven, however, is not positive, since Catholicism holds that at the very beginning, something happened which damaged the way man relates to creation. Original sin has disrupted the harmony that ought to exist between humanity and the rest of the natural world. After the fall, God says to Adam:

Cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth to you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return. (Gen. 3:17-19)

In reflecting on the effect of the fall of man on creation, in his January 1, 1990 World Day of Peace address Peace with God the Creator, Peace with All Creation (PC), Pope St. John Paul II offered some sobering thoughts. “When man turns his back on the Creator’s plan, he provokes a disorder which has inevitable repercussions on the rest of the created order” (PC 5). For John Paul II, this is reflected by the Old Testament prophet Hosea when he wrote, “Therefore the land mourns and all who dwell in it languish, and also the beasts of the field and the birds of the air and even the fish of the sea are taken away” (Hos 4:3). In our day, the pope continues, people inside and outside the faith sense that the earth is suffering. The cause of this suffering is “the behavior of people who show a callous disregard for the hidden, yet perceivable requirements of the order and harmony which govern nature itself” (PC 5).

Catholic theology claims that original sin has affected every human being in many ways. In terms of the effect of original sin on man—and thus on people’s regard for nature—I will point out just three: a darkened intellect, a weakened will, and concupiscence.

• It is hard for people to know the truth. Mankind, in fact, makes profound errors, many of which are self-chosen out of self-interest.
• In addition, our wills are weak: we might see exactly what we should do but we don’t seem to have the strength of will to do it. “The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak” (Mt. 26:41).
• Finally, we are subject to concupiscence. This means that our passions and emotions rule our reason and will rather than being directed by them.

Many if not all environmental problems stem from original sin in so far as they are a result of ignorance, short-term thinking, or willful selfishness. For example:

• Ignorance. Until recently, people simply didn’t know that some forms of irrigation could deposit so much salt in the soil that it would eventually kill the plants they wanted to grow, and so, they irrigated their fertile fields into deserts.
• Short-term thinking. Some early Yankee settlers in California learned from Native Americans that some pine trees on the eastern escarpment of the Sierra Nevada mountains were edible. So they cut down the trees to get the nuts.
• Selfish evil. In places where organized crime controls the garbage industry, toxic waste is illegally and unsafely dumped because the gangsters make more money that way.

These are examples of how humanity’s actions negatively affect the environment. But this is not inevitable or even the norm, which leads to our eighth principle: the positive transformation of the world through work.

Creation, including human nature, is wounded but it is not ruined. Creation and human nature remain essentially good. As Pope St. John Paul II points out in his encyclical Laborem exercens, “Man is the image of God partly through the mandate received from his Creator to subdue, to dominate, the earth” (LE 4). In carrying out this mandate to work, “man, every human being, reflects the very action of the Creator of the universe” (LE 4).

Even though work—humanity’s primary activity—is difficult, it is still the way we transform creation and build up human culture. Labor is one of the basic means by which people sanctify themselves, others, and creation itself.

All work which is not evil per se (like criminal activity) has dignity and value. This includes both intellectual and manual work, as well as ordinary, everyday tasks.

Just as our present world is the result of the work of hundreds of generations of people before us from which we benefit (and in some cases suffer), our work today contributes to the cultural and environmental inheritance of those who will succeed us. We stand on the shoulders of giants, and those who will come after us will benefit from any good work we do during our time on earth.

Mankind’s basic role in the natural world is to be a sub-creator or co-creator with God. Man takes things in the natural world and recombines them in order to create new things. Whether it is the creation of stories or of cell phones, this remaking of things out of something is another dimension of man’s creation in the image and likeness of God, who makes things out of nothing.

In addition, I think we can be very optimistic about the future, despite the environmental problems we face today. The reason is that just as human ingenuity has had a great role in creating our environmental problems, it can also find solutions to these problems. Henry Ford figured out a way to mass produce automobiles so that cars were affordable for everyone. This set off a worldwide transportation revolution with many positive effects, as well as negative environmental problems, like L.A. smog. However, there are far more cars in the Los Angeles basin today and far less air pollution than in the 1960s.

The ninth principle is the universal destination of goods. It answers the question of who should benefit from the goods of God’s creation and human co-creation.

God created the earth for the benefit of all human beings, not just some. This means that the resources of the earth belong to everyone. They belong to all the people living now, including the poor, and they also belong to future generations.

The Church teaches that private property and the rule of law are two powerful ways to protect people’s right to secure the goods of the earth for their own and for others’ welfare. In fact, poverty and injustice actually increase in places where governments appropriate property in the name of “the people,” where laws are inconsistent, and where contracts cannot be enforced.

Nevertheless, a street orphan in Central America has an intrinsic right to a family, to food, to shelter, to education, to a safe and clean environment, to marry (at least potentially), and so on, even though practically-speaking it is impossible to enjoy these goods at this moment. In the same way, future generations have a right to a healthy planet in which the resources are not all used up.

I think it is important to note that wealth is not a zero-sum game. Because of the innovative creativity of human beings, there is not a fixed amount of the goods of the earth such that if one person has more another person necessarily has less. The marvel of the modern world is that wealth can be created and the goods of the earth can be multiplied.

For example, in the late 1960s, Paul Ehrlich in his wildly successful book “The Population Bomb” predicted massive famines and wars due to the pressure the world’s growing population was putting on the world’s food supply.

But these famines and wars never materialized. Why? Plant breeders such as Norman Borlaug, using philanthropic funding from sources like the Rockefeller Foundation, had by that time effectively solved the world food problem by developing new strains of cereal crops which produced greater and greater yields. Just as we have more cars and less smog in Los Angeles, around the world fewer farmers are growing more food on less land than ever before. There is no foreseeable end to these developments. For example, a high protein/low starch corn has been developed which could be a great boon to the millions of people for whom corn is the staple of life.

Closely connected to the universal destination of goods is the Catholic principle that “we are all in this together” as human brothers and sisters. This is the tenth principle: solidarity. Solidarity or “brotherhood” is the practice of the sharing of material and spiritual goods (CCC 1948).

In If You Want to Cultivate Peace, Protect Creation (CPPC), Pope Benedict XVI points out that solidarity should be both intragenerational, that is, lived in regard to all who are now alive, wherever they are or whatever their economic situation, and intergenerational, that is, practiced toward those who will come after us (CPPC 8). Borlaug’s work is a prime example this solidarity. Borlaug’s green revolution helped hungry people all over the world and it will help future generations. And his work was funded, in part, through the philanthropy of John D. Rockefeller, who had long-since died but who had wanted to leave a legacy for the future.

Lack of solidarity can create environmental problems. Out of ignorance, people have thought that natural resources were limitless or that oceans were so vast that one could dump anything in them and it would simply “disappear.” This was a common attitude in the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with our vast, resource-rich continent to settle. Shortly after World War Two, for example, the Atomic Energy Commission had some steel barrels of nuclear waste. It dumped them in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Francisco. That took care of the problem, didn’t it? We know better now. Polluting the environment is like urinating in a swimming pool. We really are one human family and so, out of solidarity, we should care about what happens to other people in the world and to our descendants.

The eleventh Catholic environmental principle shapes the way we practice solidarity. It is the idea of subsidiarity. According to the Catechism, “a community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it in case of need and help to co-ordinate its activity with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the common good” (CCC 1183).

Subsidiarity means that higher levels support and coordinate the lower levels when—and only when—necessary. Higher levels do not interfere with the legitimate life and functions of the lower levels.

When it comes to environmental questions, individuals, families, civic organizations, businesses, governmental entities, and international bodies each have a legitimate sphere in which to exercise their specific responsibilities. Solutions cannot be handed down from above for everyone to obey because centralization and authoritarianism simply do not work. Individuals and groups should take responsibility within their own realm.

The twelfth principle of the Catholic environmental vision is the problem-solving virtue: prudence. Prudence is the natural virtue which governs our practical decisions. Prudence means using reason to recognize a problem or opportunity, to gather and weigh evidence, to apply objective standards, and to arrive at a decision for action. Prudence counsels us not to ignore problems. If, for example, global warming is both real and a bad thing for us and for future generations, then we are obligated to take realistic steps to act against it, without embracing impossible utopian agendas.

A particular application of subsidiarity and prudence for Catholics is that the Magisterium or teaching authority of the pope and bishops provides the principles (such as those articulated here) but the laity has the responsibility to work out concrete solutions.

As Pope Benedict XVI points out, the application of the principles of the Gospel to social life is the work of reason, “enlightened reason,” which requires Christianity to constantly “reshape and reformulate social structures and ‘Christian social teachings’” according to the concrete demands of the time (Jesus of Nazareth 126-27). This reliance on reason is why Catholics can work with fellow citizens of widely different ideologies, since we are looking for solutions which accord with reason. However, prudence is not confined to technical, practical solutions. There is another whole dimension to consider.

The thirteenth principle is that environmental decisions are moral decisions. Although some environmental matters are purely technical questions (should I use aluminum or titanium?) or involve prudential choices between goods (should I raise chickens or grow vegetables?), one must always begin environmental problem-solving by examining the moral issues involved. When prudence makes a decision, one of the sets of standards it judges by is the standard of the morally right thing to do. One may never do a direct evil or do evil so that good may come of it (Rom 3:8). To give an extreme example, if a government decided to do its part in ending its country’s “addiction to carbon” by cutting off all use of oil, natural gas, and coal, it would probably plunge its people into extreme poverty and suffering that would be morally reprehensible. This would be an example of illegitimately putting environmental ecology over human ecology.

This brings us to the have-nots.

The fourteenth and final principle of the Catholic environmental vision is the option for the poor. The Church insists that the poor and powerless must always be taken into consideration both in assessing environmental problems and in proposing solutions. Out of solidarity, those with power must take the poor into account because the poor don’t have a way of asserting their own dignity and rights. The powerless “poor” includes future generations. These have absolutely no ability to determine our decisions but nevertheless they have to live with the consequences of them.

Conclusion

The Catholic Church sees God as the good creator of his good creation. Within this creation, God has placed his god-like creature, man, to discover creation’s inner nature and wisely to direct it to his own fulfillment. Despite original sin, man can bring the goods of creation to every human being on earth and safeguard these goods for the benefit of future generations, all the while never forgetting the poor. I think this, in brief, is the Catholic vision of creation, stewardship, and solidarity.

Tomorrow (June 18), Pope Francis will release his long-awaited teaching document on the environment and human ecology. With that in mind, I wrote this article to articulate some principles that underlie the Catholic environmental vision, with the hope that atheists can better understand it and perhaps find common ground. I don’t know if these principles have been set out systematically, but in my research, I have uncovered fourteen. My selection of them is my own, as is the order in which I present them. In this article I'll identify and explicate the first six, then we'll cover another eight in my next article.

The first principle is that God is the sole creator and sustainer of the universe. This includes the laws of nature implanted in things. Because God is also good in himself, we can say that God is the good creator.

A second principle is that everything God has created is good. In Genesis, when God looks at the entire creation, including the first man and woman, he sees that it is “very good” (Gen 1: 31). One reason the author of Genesis may have included this is that human beings have a recurring temptation to see physical reality, including the human body, as evil. Gnosticism, Manichaeism, and the Albigensian heresy are three examples.

An axiom of Catholic philosophy is: “All that is is good.” This is to say, everything which has being is good. It is easy to feel that wheat, wine, sunshine, and butterflies are good. But subatomic particles, uranium, arsenic, crocodiles, and killer whales are also in themselves good. Physical evils, such as floods, tornadoes, blizzards, man-eating tigers, and dangerous microbes, are bad for us but good in their being.

The third principle is that part of the goodness of the universe is that it has a design and a purpose. Things have an inbuilt order which we can discover, recognize, and cooperate with. Everything in the universe behaves according to laws, from subatomic particles, to atoms, to molecules, to chemical compounds, to cellular life, to plants and animals, even to the human body. Matter obeys the laws of physics, plants and lower animals obey their genetic programming, and animals follow their instincts. An amazing dimension of design is the potentiality in being. Assuming the Big Bang is correct, everything that exists now is a coming into being of potentialities inherent in the singularity.

In addition, everything in nature acts for an end or purpose. Every human organ, for example, is marvelously ordered to carry out a function: the eyes see, the fingers feel, the digestive system digests, and the sex organs reproduce. All technology is predicated on discovering and using things according to the way they naturally work. When Orville and Wilber Wright understood the physical laws of thrust, lift, drag and stability on three axes, and built a machine which could exploit these laws, they learned to fly. Hence, Artigas argues that modern science and technology have grown from the specific Christian premises that there is a natural order, we can know this order, and it is good to know it (Artigas 29-30). As Feser points out, it is not necessary that anything know its end or purpose in order to act toward it (Feser 35). For example, the human reproductive system produces new human beings without any awareness and it produces human beings, not bonobos, carrots, or lead.

The fourth principle is that the human race is singular and the summit of creation. Man is singular on the earth in that there is nothing else like him. There is no other being in the physical world—at least on planet earth—with a nature which makes it possible for it to exercise reason and free will. This is one of the things we interpret Genesis to mean when it reports that God made man, “in the image and likeness of God” (Gen 1:27). As awe-inspiring as are the number, variety, complexity, and beauty of the creatures of the natural world, humans alone possess oral and written symbolic language, mathematics, art, music and philosophy.

I think it is also true to say that man is like everything else . . . but more. Man is the summit of creation because he holds within himself all the lower levels of the created world. His body is made up of subatomic particles, atoms and molecules, which obey the laws of physics. He is composed of chemicals which obey the laws of chemistry. He is a conglomerate of trillions of cells which act just like all other cellular life. His body carries out all kinds of operations automatically, like plants and animals do. He has a body which has instincts and emotions, like the higher animals. While contemplating the wonders of the natural world, the Psalmist exclaims amazement that God has made man, “little less than God, and dost crown him with glory and honor,” giving him dominion over all His creatures (Ps. 8: 3-8). We do have god-like powers.

The fifth principle is that the earth is for our use. This principle is perhaps the hardest Christian environmental truth for modern people to accept, although almost no one had a problem with it until about 1960.¹ The earth and its creatures exist for us, not us for them. In Genesis, man receives the command to “subdue” the earth. He possesses “dominion” over the animals and is “given” the plants to eat.

Why is it morally legitimate for us to “use” creation? According to the Catholic vision, there is a fundamental difference between human beings and everything else in creation. Human beings have absolute value: we are ends in ourselves. According to the Vatican II Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, man is “the only creature on earth that God has willed for its own sake” (Gaudium et spes 24). The rest of creation is of limited value: it is a means to an end. This is already seen in God’s mandate to Adam and Eve to subdue and use the things of the earth. In a highly technical explanation of this in his Summa Contra Gentiles, Thomas Aquinas writes, in reference to “subsistent intelligences,” by which he means men, “the good things which are given them . . . are not given them for the profit of any other creature: while the gifts given to other creatures by divine ordinance make for the use of intellectual creatures.” In other words, the gifts which man is endowed with are for his own benefit, not for the benefit of the creatures below him. On the other hand, the good things lower creatures possess are for our benefit (and the benefit of other lower creatures). They are for us; we are not for them. We are not designed to be shark food or malaria hosts, even though we can be those things.

This is why the earth’s ecology is at the service of human ecology and not vice versa. According to Pope Benedict XVI in his January 1, 2010 World Day of Peace Message, If You Want to Cultivate Peace, Protect Creation (CPPC), “Our duties towards the environment flow from our duties towards the person, considered both individually and in relation to others” (CPPC 12). Note that our duties towards the environment do not flow from any “duties” towards trees, dolphins, the air, or the earth as a whole. For example, the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) tells us,

[I]t is legitimate to use animals for food and clothing. They may be domesticated to help man in his work and leisure. Medical and scientific experimentation on animals is a morally acceptable practice if it remains within reasonable limits and contributes to caring for or saving human lives. (CCC 2417)

On the other hand, an environmental policy or practice that does real harm to people to benefit “the environment” is wrong. For example, some environmental activists hammer spikes into trees to “save” them and to punish the logging industry. If the spikes are discovered, they must be laboriously removed, and they lower the economic value of the trees. If they are not found, they could physically injure a logger or sawmill worker when the saw hits the hard object.

If it is legitimate for man to use creation, may he use it any way he wishes? As we will see later, the answer is no.

This brings us to the sixth principle: Stewardship is man’s God-given mandate to direct wisely the development of the earth. If we look back over the five principles articulated so far, one could argue that the first great principle of the Catholic environmental vision is that God is the good creator of everything that is. The second is that man is God’s steward of creation. The principal of stewardship is also the answer—or at least an answer—to those who (falsely) say Christians believe God has given them license to rape the environment. A steward is not the owner of a good thing but rather the one who is entrusted with its use and care. The owner of the entire natural world is God who has given mankind the order to fill the earth and subdue it. Man’s stewardship imposes responsibilities on him.

Man’s stewardship includes respect for God’s creation. A person’s abuse of creation is wrong because it degrades him and is an injustice to other people on earth and to future generations. However, it is not wrong because of any inherent rights which lower created things possess. Abuse of creation is also wrong because it is a kind of insult to God who has created it good.

Man’s actual practice of stewardship can be seen in human history, which is an astonishing account of man’s dominion over and use of the goods of the earth through discovery, adaptation, and technology. We rightly think of our age as one of an explosion of knowledge and of astounding scientific and technological progress. But the discovery and use of fire, the domestication of animals, and the development of agriculture all occurred in human prehistory.

Stewardship is also not optional. As Pope Benedict XVI points out, God has created the world with a certain “grammar” which includes “giving man the role of a steward and administrator with responsibility over creation, a role which man must certainly not abuse, but also one which he may not abdicate” (CPPC 13). Whether anyone likes it or not, man is master of creation. Therefore, he has a responsibility.

In the next post, I will articulate the final eight principles. After that, if there is interest, I can start applying these principles to specific environmental issues.

Dr. Manuel Nevado (left) and St. Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer (right).

My goal in this post is to show how the Catholic Church made the rational judgment, after serious investigation, that one man received a miracle of healing through the intercession of another.

In discussing this “miracle,” I will rely on two definitions of the word miracle. Fr. John Hardon, S.J., wrote: “In theological language, a miracle is an extraordinary event, performed by God, which can be perceived by the senses and which exceeds the powers of nature.” This is what the Catholic Church means in general by a miracle.

Monsignor Michele Di Ruberto, the undersecretary of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, defines a miracle as an “event that goes beyond the forces of nature, which is realized by God outside of what is normal in the whole of created nature by the intercession of a servant of God or a blessed.” This is what the Catholic Church means by a miracle in connection with the process of beatification or canonization.

Dr. Manuel Nevado suffered from cancerous chronic radiodermatitis. His “miraculous cure” is known because it was carefully investigated by the Catholic Church in connection with the canonization of Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer. It is the “miracle” which opened the way for Pope John Paul II to declare Escriva a saint.

Before going into the putative miracle, here is how the Catholic Church judges whether God has performed a miracle through a saint’s intercession. I’ll be quoting The Process of Investigation of an Alleged Miracle in the Causes for Canonization by Stefania Falasca.

The rules for the legal process for this were established in 1983 by the Apostolic Constitution Divinus Perfectionis Magister.

In it, there are two subsequent phases. The first is the diocesan phase. It is undertaken in the diocese in which the alleged miracle took place. The second phase takes place in Rome and is undertaken by the Congregation for the Causes of Saints.

At the diocesan-level, “the bishop opens an inquiry into an alleged miracle during which both the testimony of eyewitnesses, questioned by a duly constituted court, is taken and the complete clinical and instrumental documentation inherent to the case” is recorded.

When the diocesan enquiry is completed, the Congregation for the Causes of Saints sets in motion its process, which, when completed, will be the basis of its verdict. The Congregation subjects the material gathered to two separate investigations, again, one after the other. The first is medical and the second is theological.

According to Falasca, “The medical examination is conducted by...the medical Consulta, a collegiate body made up of five specialists plus two in-house experts. The specialists vary according to the clinical cases presented and the request for consultation or eventual convocation of other experts and specialists is not ruled out. Their testimony is purely scientific, they do not pronounce on the miracle. The examination and final discussion of the medical Consulta conclude by establishing the exact diagnosis of the illness, prognosis, treatment and end result.”

In order for the event “to be regarded as a possible miracle the healing must be judged by the specialists as rapid, complete, lasting, and inexplicable by current medical and scientific knowledge.”

If the medical Consulta pronounces “a majority or unanimous verdict in favor of the extra-natural character of the healing” according to that criteria, then the inquiry passes to the Consulta of theologians.

Why to theologians? It goes to theologians because the medical experts can only look at a healing and declare that it is, at least currently, empirically inexplicable.

The job of the advisory theologians is to identify “the causal link between the prayers to the servant of God and the healing, and express their opinion on whether the prodigious event is a true miracle.”

When the theologians have drafted their verdict, “the evaluation is submitted to the ordinary Congregation of bishops and cardinals, who debate all the features of the miracle.”

All these opinions are then submitted to the pope, who decides whether to declare the event a miracle or not. If he approves the miracle, he authorizes the Congregation for the Causes of the Saints to promulgate a decree to this effect, declaring the event a miracle. In the case of Dr. Nevado’s cure and St. Josemaria’s intercession as its cause, the pope declared in the positive.

Here is the full decree declaring the approval of the miracle, a summary of the facts, and the process of examination.
 

JOSEMARÍA ESCRIVÁ DE BALAGUER
The Miracle Approved for the Canonization

 
On December 20, 2001, Pope John Paul II approved the decree issued by the Congregation for the Causes of Saints on a miraculous cure attributed to the intercession of Blessed Josemaria Escriva. The miracle was the cure of Dr. Manuel Nevado from cancerous chronic radiodermatitis, an incurable disease, which took place in November 1992. The decree opened the doors for the canonization of Blessed Josemaria.

 

Radiodermatitis 
 
Radiodermatitis is a typical skin disease of medical professionals who have been repeatedly exposed to radiation from X-ray machines over a long period of time. The disease is progressive and evolves inexorably, causing the appearance of skin cancers. Radiodermatitis has no cure. The only known treatments are surgical interventions: skin grafts, or amputation of the affected parts of the hand. To date, no case of a spontaneous cure from cancerous chronic radiodermatitis has ever been recorded in medical literature.

 

The Cure
 
Dr. Manuel Nevado Rey was born in Spain in 1932. A specialist in orthopedic surgery, he operated on fractures and other injuries for nearly 15 years with frequent exposure of his hands to X-rays. The first symptoms of radiodermatitis began to appear in 1962, and the disease continued to worsen. By 1984, he had to limit his activities to minor operations because his hands were gravely affected. He stopped operating completely in the summer of 1992, but did not undergo any treatment.

 

In November 1992, Dr. Nevado met Luis Eugenio Bernardo Carrascal, an agricultural engineer working for the Spanish government. On hearing about his disease, Luis Eugenio offered him a prayer card of the Founder of Opus Dei who had been beatified on May 17 that year, and invited him to pray for the cure of his radiodermatitis.

 

The Intercession of Blessed Josemaria
 
Dr. Nevado began praying for a cure through the intercession of Blessed Josemaria. A few days after that meeting, he traveled to Vienna with his wife in order to attend a medical conference. They visited several churches and came across prayer cards of Blessed Josemaria. “This impressed me,” explained Dr. Nevado, “and it encouraged me to pray more for my cure.” From the day that he began to entrust his cure to the intercession of Blessed Josemaria, his hands began to improve. Within a fortnight the lesions had completely disappeared and the cure was complete. By January 1993, Dr. Nevado had returned to perform surgical operations without any problems.

 

The Canonical Process 
 
The canonical process on this miracle took place in the archdiocese of Badajoz where Dr. Nevado lives, and was concluded in 1994. On July 10, 1997, the Medical Committee of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints unanimously established the following diagnosis: a cancerous state of chronic radiodermatitis in its third and irreversible stage; therefore with certain prognosis of infaust (without hope of cure). The complete cure of the lesions, confirmed by the objective examinations carried out on Dr. Nevado in 1992, 1994 and 1997, was declared by the Medical Committee to be very rapid, complete, lasting, and scientifically inexplicable.

 

On January 9, 1998, the Committee of Theologian Consultants gave its unanimous approval for attributing the miracle to Blessed Josemaria. The Congregation of the Causes of Saints confirmed these conclusions on September 21, 2001.

According to Hardon, a miracle is (1) an extraordinary event, (2) which can be perceived by the senses, (3) which exceeds the powers of nature, and (4) is performed by God.

(1) If the facts alleged are true, the event certainly appears to be extraordinary: Nevado was cured of an incurable form of cancer.

(2) It also was an event that was perceived by the senses. Physical evidence was studied from before and after the cure.

(3) It also appeared to exceed the powers of nature, as far as are now know. That, of course, is a judgment of reason limited by our current, best understanding of this form of cancer and the healing powers of the human body.

(4) That leaves “performed by God.” This point goes to Di Ruberto’s definition that a miracle is “realized by God...by the intercession of a servant of God or a blessed.” The judgment that anything is actually performed by God is a judgment of reason even if you are the pope. Anyone who wants to can judge either way based on one’s assumptions and how compelling the evidence is.

If you are not convinced that this was a miracle, at least I hope you are convinced that the pope's decision was based on a serious investigation and a rational judgment, either by a preponderance of the evidence or evidence beyond a reasonable doubt.

The Catholic Church has set up criteria for determining whom it will recognize as being in heaven, and so, who is worthy of the faithful’s veneration and petition. The Church has a canonization process for the benefit of the faithful of the Catholic Church. In the case of Josemaria Escriva, it was to hold up to the faithful a model of the Christian life that has a special relevance to living the faith in our time. The pope is acknowledging that St. Josemaria is in heaven and is a worthy example to be followed in his message that holiness is for everyone and that it can be found in the ordinary circumstances of our lives.