"Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do — and greater works than these will he do, because I am going to the Father." — John 14:12
Every age of the Church has been an age of miracles.
Not because God is performing a celestial conjuring act for credulous audiences. Not because the laws of nature are unreliable or the world is strange. But because the God who created nature is greater than nature, and because His love for His children is so vast, so intimate, so utterly personal, that He will act — through the prayers of His saints, through the intercession of those who stand in His presence — to heal, to restore, to raise up, to confound every calculation of despair.
This is what the miracles of the saints declare: God is here. God is near. God answers prayer.
The Catholic Church does not collect miracle stories as curiosities. She investigates them with rigorous, often brutal scrutiny — medical boards, theological commissions, canonical proceedings that can last decades. She rejects far more than she accepts. She is constitutionally suspicious of the sensational and constitutionally committed to the truth. When the Church finally says this cannot be explained by any natural cause — she means it with the full weight of two thousand years of careful discernment.
What follows is not legend. It is not piety dressed as history. It is the documented, investigated, canonically verified record of a God who keeps His promise: "And these signs will accompany those who believe." (Mark 16:17)
✝ PART I — WHAT IS A MIRACLE? ✝
The Catholic Theological Definition
A miracle is not, as modern scepticism frames it, a violation of natural law. That framing misunderstands both miracles and nature. Nature is not an autonomous, self-sufficient machine. It is creation — the ongoing gift of God's sustaining love. God does not break nature when He performs a miracle. He acts above it, beyond it, or through it in a manner that no secondary cause — no natural power within creation itself — could produce.
St. Thomas Aquinas, the Angelic Doctor, gives the most precise theological definition in his Summa Contra Gentiles (III.101):
"Those things are properly called miracles which are done by divine power beyond the order usually observed in nature."
Aquinas distinguishes three grades of miracle based on their relationship to natural possibility:
The First Grade — things that nature could never do under any circumstances. The resurrection of a dead body. The instantaneous reconstitution of destroyed tissue. The restoration of a limb that has ceased to exist. These are miracles in the highest and strictest sense.
The Second Grade — things that nature could conceivably do, but not in this subject, at this time, by these means. A cancer in its final stage suddenly gone. A compound fracture healed without any medical intervention overnight. Nature has the capacity for such processes — but not like this, not now, not here.
The Third Grade — things that nature could do, but which God produces without the usual natural processes. Rain coming precisely when and where it was prayed for. A fever breaking at the moment of anointing. Less dramatic, but no less real.
The Church, in her canonical investigations, is principally concerned with miracles of the first and second grades — phenomena so clearly beyond natural explanation that no competent, honest medical examiner can account for them.
What Miracles Are Not
It is important to state clearly what Catholic theology does not claim.
Miracles are not violations of logic or coherence. God does not make two plus two equal five. He does not make the same body simultaneously alive and dead. Miracles are extraordinary acts of divine power — not contradictions of reason.
Miracles are not magic. Magic seeks to manipulate supernatural forces through technique, formula, or compulsion. A miracle is a free gift of God — given in response to prayer, to faith, to intercession — entirely at His initiative, never compelled by the one who prays or the one who intercedes.
Miracles are not infallible proofs of holiness in the recipient. A sick person healed through a saint's intercession is not themselves thereby declared holy. The miracle confirms the saint's standing before God — not the recipient's. This is why the Church verifies that miracles occur through the intercession of a specific candidate for beatification or canonisation — they are evidence of the candidate's access to God, not of the recipient's virtue.
✝ PART II — THE BIBLICAL FOUNDATION ✝
The Old Testament: Miracles as Signs of the Covenant
Long before the Church was born, the People of Israel lived with miracles as part of their covenant experience. They were not marginal exotic episodes. They were signs — otot in Hebrew — visible confirmations that the invisible God was truly present with His people and active in their history.
The waters of the Red Sea parted before Moses (Exodus 14:21–22). The Jordan stopped before the Ark of the Covenant (Joshua 3:14–17). The sun stood still for Joshua (Joshua 10:12–14). The widow of Zarephath's oil and flour did not run out through the drought (1 Kings 17:14–16). Elijah raised her dead son from the bier (1 Kings 17:17–24) — the first recorded resurrection of the dead in Scripture. His successor Elisha doubled his miracles: he too raised the dead (2 Kings 4:32–37), healed leprosy (2 Kings 5:1–14), multiplied food (2 Kings 4:42–44). Even dead bones retained miraculous power — a corpse thrown hastily into Elisha's tomb came back to life when it touched his bones (2 Kings 13:21). This is the very theology of relics, written into the Old Testament.
The three young men — Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego — walked unharmed in Nebuchadnezzar's furnace, heated seven times hotter than usual, while a fourth figure walked with them whose appearance was "like a son of the gods" (Daniel 3:25). Daniel emerged unscathed from the lions' den (Daniel 6:22). Judith was strengthened beyond natural capacity (Judith 13:7–8). The Maccabean martyrs died with miraculous endurance that astonished their torturers (2 Maccabees 7).
These were not legends embellished by later piety. They were the living memory of a nation that had encountered the living God — and they established the theological grammar within which the miracles of Christ and His saints would later be read.
Christ: The Miracle-Worker Par Excellence
When Jesus of Nazareth began His public ministry, His miracles were not incidental to His message — they were part of it. When John the Baptist sent disciples to ask "Are you the one who is to come?", Jesus answered not with a theological argument but with a list of miracles: "the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have the good news preached to them." (Matthew 11:4–5) This was the answer that Scripture had promised. These were the signs of the messianic age.
Christ's miracles fall into the same categories the Church would later use in canonisation investigations:
Healings: The blind man born blind (John 9), the ten lepers (Luke 17:11–19), the paralytic at the pool of Bethesda (John 5:1–9), the woman with a haemorrhage of twelve years instantly cured at His touch (Mark 5:25–34), Peter's mother-in-law (Matthew 8:14–15), the man with the withered hand (Mark 3:1–5), the deaf-mute (Mark 7:31–37), the man born blind at Bethsaida (Mark 8:22–26).
Raisings from the Dead: The daughter of Jairus, raised from the dead in her father's house (Mark 5:35–43). The son of the widow of Nain, raised from the bier as he was being carried to burial (Luke 7:11–17). Lazarus, dead four days, called forth from the sealed tomb (John 11:38–44). The greatest miracle of resurrection — His own — on the third day, witnessed by hundreds (1 Corinthians 15:3–8).
Miracles of Nature: The water turned to wine at Cana (John 2:1–11). The multiplication of five loaves and two fish to feed five thousand (Matthew 14:13–21). The calming of the storm (Mark 4:35–41). Walking on water (Matthew 14:22–33). The miraculous catch of fish (Luke 5:1–11 and John 21:1–8).
Exorcisms: The Gerasene demoniac (Mark 5:1–20). The Syrophoenician woman's daughter (Mark 7:24–30). The boy with an unclean spirit after the Transfiguration (Mark 9:14–29).
And then the promise that changed everything — the promise that defines the entire subsequent history of miracles in the Church. Before His Passion, at the Last Supper, Jesus said to His apostles:
"Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do — and greater works than these will he do, because I am going to the Father. Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son." — John 14:12–13
This is not a pious metaphor. It is a promise. And the Acts of the Apostles is the first record of its fulfilment.
The Acts of the Apostles: Miracles Continue
The Acts of the Apostles is a catalogue of miracles performed by the apostles and early Church in the name of Jesus Christ.
Peter and John healed the man lame from birth at the Beautiful Gate of the Temple (Acts 3:1–10). Peter's shadow falling on the sick healed them (Acts 5:15). Handkerchiefs and aprons that had touched Paul's skin were carried to the sick and healed them (Acts 19:12). Peter raised Tabitha — a woman of Joppa devoted to works of charity — from the dead (Acts 9:36–41), following almost exactly the same pattern as Elisha's raising centuries before, and as Jesus's own raising of Jairus's daughter. Paul raised Eutychus, who had fallen from a third-storey window (Acts 20:7–12). Paul was bitten by a viper on the island of Malta and suffered no harm (Acts 28:3–6).
The pattern was unmistakable and intentional: the miracles of the apostles confirmed that the Risen Christ was truly present in His Church, acting through His members, fulfilling His promise that greater works would follow.
St. Augustine of Hippo, writing in the early fifth century in the City of God (Book XXII, Chapter 8), devoted an entire chapter to miracles occurring at the shrines of the martyrs in his own day — miracles he had personally witnessed or that had been reported in writing to the bishop and read publicly before the congregation. His testimony is unambiguous:
"For even now miracles are wrought in the name of Christ, whether by his sacraments or by the prayers or relics of his saints."
The age of miracles had not ended. It never ends.
✝ PART III — THE CHURCH'S CRITERIA FOR VERIFYING MIRACLES ✝
Pope Benedict XIV and the Canonical Standard
The most important figure in the history of the Church's evaluation of miracles is not a mystic or a saint-maker. He is a scholar and canonist: Prospero Lambertini, who became Pope Benedict XIV (reigned 1740–1758), and who before his election spent decades as the Promoter of the Faith — the official whose duty was to argue against the canonisation of candidates, earning the popular nickname "Devil's Advocate."
In his monumental work De Servorum Dei Beatificatione et Beatorum Canonizatione — the definitive canonical treatise on the beatification and canonisation of saints — Benedict XIV established criteria for the verification of miracles that remain in use to this day. He was not a credulous man. He was a rigorous legal mind who had spent his career looking for weaknesses in miracle claims. The criteria he established reflect that rigour.
For a miraculous healing to be accepted in a canonisation cause, Benedict XIV required that:
1. The patient must have had a serious or life-threatening illness that was beyond the ordinary power of medical art to cure at that time.
2. There must have been no treatment administered that could have produced the cure, or any treatment given must have been demonstrably insufficient to explain the recovery.
3. The cure must have been sudden and instantaneous — not a gradual improvement consistent with natural recovery.
4. The cure must have been complete — not partial, not progressive, but total and immediate.
5. The cure must have been lasting — the illness must not have returned.
These criteria were not softened by the Second Vatican Council or by subsequent popes. They were tightened. The modern process adds a medical board of independent experts — including non-Catholic and atheist physicians — who must unanimously certify that the cure cannot be explained by any natural cause before the theological commission even begins its examination.
Pope St. John Paul II canonised more saints than all his predecessors combined — but he did not lower the bar. He insisted on rigorous scientific investigation of every miracle, precisely because the miracles had to be real to be credible. A Church that accepted dubious miracles would be a Church that had abandoned truth. The rigour is the credibility.
How the Miracle Investigation Works Today
When a miracle is attributed to the intercession of a Blessed or Venerable candidate, the process of investigation involves multiple layers of scrutiny:
The local bishop first gathers testimony and medical records. The case is submitted to Rome with all documentation.
The Dicastery for the Causes of Saints convenes a medical board of five independent physicians — specialists in the relevant field, chosen for their expertise, not their faith. They examine all available medical records without knowing the religious context. They are asked one question: can this be explained by any natural cause? Their judgment must be unanimous. If even one expert believes a natural explanation is possible, the case cannot proceed.
The theological commission then examines whether the cure occurred through the specific intercession of the candidate — not just through prayer in general, but through prayer explicitly invoking this particular person.
The cardinals and bishops of the Dicastery review both reports before the case goes to the Pope for final decision.
This is not a system designed to produce miracles. It is a system designed to eliminate fraud, wishful thinking, natural explanation, and coincidence. What survives this process is what the Church judges to be genuinely inexplicable by natural means — and therefore attributable to divine intervention through the saint's intercession.
✝ PART IV — CATEGORIES OF MIRACLES ✝
Healing Miracles
The overwhelming majority of miracles verified in canonisation causes are healings — the restoration of health beyond any natural expectation. Cancer in its final stage suddenly and completely gone. Organs that had ceased to function restored to perfect health. Conditions declared irreversible reversed overnight.
This is not an accident. Healing is the form of miracle most easily documented — medical records exist before and after; the condition can be precisely described; independent experts can examine the evidence. The Church's preference for healing miracles in canonisation proceedings reflects her preference for what can be verified by the most rigorous means available.
But healing miracles are not the whole story.
Raisings from the Dead
The Church's tradition attests to multiple raisings from the dead through the intercession of saints — following the biblical pattern of Elijah, Elisha, Peter, Paul, and Christ Himself.
St. Francis Xavier was reported to have raised several persons from the dead during his missionary journeys in India and Japan. These cases were examined in his canonisation proceedings (1622) and were among the miracles accepted by Pope Gregory XV in declaring him a saint.
St. Vincent Ferrer, the great Dominican preacher of the fifteenth century, had more miracles formally documented at his canonisation than perhaps any other saint in history — over eight hundred investigated and verified by the commission appointed by Pope Callixtus III. Among them were multiple cases of the dead restored to life. He was canonised in 1455.
St. John of God, founder of the Brothers Hospitallers, raised a child from the dead in Granada in 1547 — a case investigated at his canonisation proceedings. He was canonised in 1690.
These are not ghost stories. They are canonical records examined by papal commissions under the most rigorous scrutiny the Church of their time could apply.
Bilocation
Among the most astonishing mystical phenomena associated with certain saints is bilocation — the simultaneous presence of the same person in two distinct physical locations. This transcends ordinary categories of natural possibility and falls entirely within the domain of divine action.
St. Padre Pio of Pietrelcina (1887–1968) is the most extensively documented bilocating saint in modern history. Hundreds of witnesses testified to encountering him in places far from his friary at San Giovanni Rotondo — in homes, in trenches during the Second World War, at the bedsides of the dying. The cases were investigated by the Holy Office, which subjected Padre Pio to decades of scrutiny. They could not disprove the testimonies. He was canonised by Pope St. John Paul II in 2002.
St. Martin de Porres, the Dominican lay brother of Lima (1579–1639), was reported to have appeared simultaneously in places as far apart as Mexico, Japan, and Africa while never leaving his monastery. Witnesses in multiple countries gave sworn testimony. He was canonised in 1962.
St. Anthony of Padua appeared simultaneously in two places on at least one famous occasion — and the incident was so widely known that it contributed to the extraordinary speed of his canonisation, just one year after his death in 1232.
Incorruption
Among the most visible and humanly inexplicable signs of holiness is the preservation of a saint's body beyond all natural expectation. The bodies of the holy dead should decompose. When they do not — when they are found whole, flexible, and sometimes fragrant decades or centuries after death, without embalming or any preservative treatment — the Church investigates carefully.
This subject is treated in full on the Incorrupt Saints page of this blog. But it belongs in any complete treatment of miracles, because incorruption is itself a miracle — one that speaks directly and visibly of the Resurrection of the Body and of the dignity of the flesh that was a temple of the Holy Spirit.
St. Catherine of Siena, St. Teresa of Γvila, St. John Vianney, St. Bernadette Soubirous, St. Francis Xavier — their bodies remain incorrupt, testifying to the power of grace over corruption and death.
The Odour of Sanctity
Many saints — both in life and after death — have been associated with an inexplicable, beautiful fragrance, described by witnesses as floral or other-worldly: roses, lilies, violets, a sweetness that no natural cause could explain. This is known as the odour of sanctity.
St. ThΓ©rΓ¨se of Lisieux promised to send roses from heaven as a sign of her intercession — and countless recipients of her intercession have reported the sudden, inexplicable scent of roses at moments of grace.
St. Pio of Pietrelcina is perhaps most famous for this phenomenon in modern times — witnesses reported the scent of flowers, tobacco, or carbolic acid in his presence and at distances far from him, associated with his bilocation and his intercession. The fragrance was so consistent and so widely reported that even investigators hostile to his cause could not dismiss it.
St. Joseph of Cupertino (1603–1663) — the flying friar, who levitated so frequently during Mass that his superiors had to assign him private Masses to avoid the disruption to the congregation — was also associated with a beautiful fragrance, as were many of the great mystics.
Prophecy Fulfilled
The gift of prophecy — knowing beforehand what has not yet occurred — is among the most difficult supernatural phenomena to evaluate, precisely because its verification requires time. But the Church's record contains cases where the prophecies of saints were so specific, so detailed, and so fully verified by subsequent events that natural explanation fails.
St. Padre Pio was renowned for reading souls — knowing the sins of penitents before they confessed them, knowing events at great distances, foreseeing deaths and conversions. His superiors documented these phenomena meticulously. The files in Rome run to thousands of pages.
St. John Bosco had prophetic dreams — detailed visions of future events, sometimes decades ahead — that were recorded in writing at the time they occurred and verified by the events that followed. His dream of the two columns, the great ship of the Church guided to anchor between the column of the Eucharist and the column of Our Lady — interpreted as prophetic of the Church's history in the twentieth century — was dreamed and recorded in 1862 and continues to be fulfilled.
St. Catherine of Siena, who had never left Siena when she wrote her famous letters to Pope Gregory XI urging him to return from Avignon to Rome, predicted specific events in the history of the papacy with an accuracy that astonished those who received her letters.
✝ PART V — THE GREATEST MIRACLES: NAMED AND DOCUMENTED ✝
St. Peter and Tabitha of Joppa — c. 40 AD
"Now there was in Joppa a disciple named Tabitha... She became ill and died... Peter put them all outside, and knelt down and prayed; and turning to the body he said, 'Tabitha, arise.' And she opened her eyes, and when she saw Peter she sat up. And he gave her his hand and raised her up." — Acts 9:36–41
This is the apostolic template for every miracle of raising the dead that follows in the Church's history. Peter does not act on his own authority — he kneels in prayer first. He calls on the name of Jesus Christ. The miracle is Christ's, wrought through His servant's intercession. This pattern — prayer, invocation, divine action — is the invariable structure of the miracles of the saints across twenty centuries.
St. Gregory the Great and the Plague of Rome — 590 AD
When Gregory was elected Pope in 590 AD, Rome was being devastated by plague. He organised a great penitential procession through the city, calling the people to prayer and penance. At the moment the procession reached the Mausoleum of Hadrian, Gregory saw a vision of the Archangel Michael sheathing his sword above the monument — and the plague stopped. The mausoleum has been called the Castel Sant'Angelo — the Castle of the Holy Angel — ever since, and the bronze statue of St. Michael sheathing his sword stands upon it to this day as a permanent memorial to the miracle.
Gregory himself did not attribute the miracle to his own holiness. He attributed it to the mercy of God responding to the prayer of His people. This is always the saint's own interpretation of miracles worked through them: not their power, but God's mercy through their intercession.
St. Francis Xavier and the Raisings in India — 1542–1552
Francis Xavier (1506–1552), the great Navarrese Jesuit who brought the Gospel to India, Japan, and the edges of China, was the subject of an extraordinary number of miracles documented in his canonisation proceedings. Among them were multiple raisings from the dead — persons declared dead, sometimes for hours, restored to life at Xavier's prayer.
The most famous occurred at Comoro on the island of Mozambique in 1542 — one of the earliest stops on his journey. A young man who had died was brought to Xavier, who prayed over him and restored him to life. The witnesses were many and the accounts were recorded in the canonical process.
Xavier died on the island of Sancian in 1552, within sight of the Chinese coast he had dreamed of evangelising. His body, buried in lime on the island, was exhumed months later entirely incorrupt. It was carried to Goa, where it remains — incorrupt to this day — in the Basilica of Bom Jesus. He was canonised in 1622. He is the patron saint of India, of Goa, of the missions, and of all who carry the Gospel to the ends of the earth.
The Pierre de Rudder Miracle — Oostacker, Belgium, 1875
On 7 April 1875, a forty-two-year-old Belgian labourer named Pierre de Rudder knelt at the Lourdes grotto replica in Oostacker. He had been carrying, for eight years, a compound fracture of the left leg — the tibia and fibula both broken clean through, the two-inch gap between the bone ends filled with nothing but inflamed tissue, the leg hanging loose and useless, the wound perpetually open and suppurating. Over eight years, eleven different physicians had examined the leg. All documented the same finding: the bones were not joined and could not knit. There was no medical possibility of natural healing.
At Oostacker, de Rudder prayed before the statue of Our Lady of Lourdes. He stood up and walked. His leg was whole.
The physicians who examined him afterwards — including those who had previously documented the impossibility of healing — found both bones completely healed, the gap filled with new bone, the leg perfectly sound. The healing was instantaneous and complete. De Rudder walked without a limp for the remaining twenty-three years of his life until his death in 1898. After his death, his bones were examined by a panel of medical experts. The new bone bridging the old fracture site was clearly visible. The case was examined by the diocese of Bruges and remains one of the most completely documented miraculous healings in the entire Catholic tradition.
The Lourdes Medical Bureau and Vittorio Micheli — 1963
Since 1858, when the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared eighteen times to St. Bernadette Soubirous at the grotto of Massabielle in Lourdes, hundreds of millions of pilgrims have journeyed to the shrine. Thousands of cures have been reported. The Church established, in 1882, a Medical Bureau at Lourdes — initially under the direction of physicians, now staffed by an international committee of medical experts drawn from multiple countries and disciplines, including non-Catholics — to investigate claimed cures with scientific rigour.
Of the thousands of cures reported since 1858, seventy have been officially declared miraculous by the Church after investigation. The bar is extraordinarily high. The Bureau has rejected the vast majority of reported cures as insufficiently documented, naturally explicable, or not meeting Benedict XIV's criteria.
One of the most remarkable of the declared miracles is that of Vittorio Micheli, an Italian soldier who arrived at Lourdes in May 1963. He was twenty-three years old, suffering from a massive sarcoma of the left hip — a cancer that had eaten away the entire hip socket, leaving the femur literally floating free in a mass of tumour. The x-rays showed total destruction of the pelvis in that region. His physicians considered him beyond treatment. He was carried to Lourdes on a stretcher.
After bathing in the Lourdes waters, Micheli experienced an immediate sensation of heat and relief. Within a month he was walking without support. The tumour had vanished. More remarkably still, his destroyed hip socket had been completely reconstituted — new bone had grown to fill the void where the cancer had been. His case was studied by the Lourdes Medical Bureau and by an international panel of physicians over eight years. In 1971, the diocese of Verona declared the healing miraculous. It remains one of the most medically extraordinary cases in the Bureau's records.
The significance of Vittorio Micheli's case is not merely the elimination of cancer — it is the reconstitution of bone that had been destroyed. Bone does not regenerate to fill destroyed sockets. No medical treatment produces this effect. The healing was, in Benedict XIV's precise classification, a miracle of the first grade: something that nature could not do under any circumstances.
St. Vincent Ferrer — Eight Hundred Miracles
In the late fourteenth century, the Church of the West endured its most agonising wound: the Great Schism, in which rival claimants to the throne of Peter divided Christendom into warring obediences. Into that confusion God sent a Dominican friar from Valencia — Vincent Ferrer — whose mission was nothing less than the conversion of Europe, and whose passage through France, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, and the British Isles left behind a trail of miracles so vast in number that the Church has never quite seen their like before or since.
Vincent was a man of extraordinary intellectual gifts who had mastered philosophy and Scripture before he was thirty, yet it was not learning that drew the multitudes to him but fire — the fire of his preaching on judgement and mercy, which reduced entire cities to repentance, and the fire of the miraculous that surrounded his steps like a visible seal of divine commission. He preached to crowds of tens of thousands in open fields, in languages he did not always know, and was understood by all — a phenomenon reported consistently by eyewitnesses of different nationalities across thirty years of apostolic travel. When he arrived in a town the sick were brought from surrounding villages; lepers, paralytics, and the blind waited in the streets. He blessed them and they rose.
The miracle that stands at the summit of his extraordinary record is one of sovereign power over death itself. At Salamanca in Spain, as Vincent was preaching on the resurrection of the body, a woman in the congregation cried out that she did not believe the dead would rise. Vincent paused, left the pulpit, went to the cemetery, and called the name of a man recently buried. The man rose from his tomb. Vincent asked him to confirm before the assembly that what he had preached was true, and the dead man did so — then lay down again, his witness given, and returned to his rest. The assembled crowd was beyond counting.
This was not an isolated event. By the time Vincent died in Vannes, Brittany, in 1419, the sworn testimonies gathered for his canonisation process ran to volumes. Pope Callixtus III, who opened the formal inquiry, commissioned theologians and bishops to examine the depositions of witnesses who had seen or experienced miraculous healings. When those proceedings were concluded and Vincent was canonised in 1455, the verified and formally enumerated miracles stood at more than eight hundred — a figure unmatched in any other canonisation process in the Church's history. Among them were multiple raisings from the dead, the restoration of sight to the blind, the cure of paralytics whose condition had been known for years, and healings of lepers at a time when leprosy was considered the most irremediable of human afflictions.
The scale of Vincent's miracles is not incidental to his sanctity but expressive of it. He had given himself utterly to the proclamation of the Gospel in its most urgent form — the call to repentance before the judgement of God — and the signs that followed his word were the confirmation God attached to that proclamation. He is venerated as the patron of builders and of missions; his feast falls on the sixth of April; and in the churches of Valencia, where he was born, and Vannes, where he died, the testimonies of those eight hundred miracles remain, the most comprehensively documented supernatural record in the annals of the saints.
St. Joseph of Cupertino — The Flying Friar
There is perhaps no phenomenon in the history of the saints more extensively witnessed, more repeatedly documented, and more utterly inexplicable by natural science than the levitations of Joseph of Cupertino. A Conventual Franciscan friar from a village in Apulia in southern Italy, Joseph lived in the seventeenth century — an age not of legend but of meticulous record-keeping — and his flights were observed not only by his brother friars but by princes, cardinals, ambassadors, and a reigning emperor. The accumulated testimony constitutes one of the most remarkable bodies of evidence the Church has ever assembled in a cause for canonisation.
Joseph was, by his own estimation and that of his superiors, a man of no extraordinary gifts. He was not a theologian; he struggled with learning; he had failed his first attempt at ordination. What he possessed was a love of God so total, so absorbed, so unguarded, that the slightest reminder of the divine — a word of the liturgy, the name of Mary, the sight of a religious image — would throw him into a rapture from which, repeatedly, his body would simply rise from the ground. His superiors found this less a consolation than a difficulty. The disruption to community prayer was so consistent that for thirty-five years Joseph was forbidden to attend choir, to take meals with the community, or to celebrate Mass publicly. He was assigned a private chapel, a private refectory, and a small cell, and the faithful who sought him out were managed with care, for the scenes that attended his Masses were beyond ordinary order.
What those who did attend reported was this: Joseph, in the midst of the consecration, would emit a sharp cry — his brethren knew it as the signal — and would rise from the altar, sometimes hovering at the height of the candles, sometimes ascending to the top of the altar, and once, at Osimo, to the top of a tall cross that stood in the nave, where he knelt in mid-air and embraced it. These events were not momentary. Witnesses described him remaining aloft in prayer for extended periods before descending as gently as he had risen. The friar assigned to accompany him to his private chapel recorded the events with the matter-of-fact precision of a man who had grown accustomed to the impossible.
The most celebrated single event occurred when the ambassador of the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand III came to Assisi during his Italian tour and sought an audience with the famous friar. Joseph was led into the church to meet the ambassador, cast his gaze on a painting of the Immaculate Conception above the door, cried out, and flew the length of the nave — a distance witnesses estimated at forty feet — to embrace the painting, hanging in the air before it in prayer. The ambassador's wife, a Protestant, was so shaken by what she saw that she subsequently converted to Catholicism. Ferdinand III himself, hearing the account, requested to see Joseph; an audience was arranged; Joseph flew again. The emperor stated in writing that he had witnessed it.
In all, the depositions gathered for Joseph's cause recorded more than seventy distinct levitation events, many of them attested by multiple witnesses simultaneously. He was canonised in 1767 by Pope Clement XIII and remains the patron saint of aviators — a patronage that carries a gentle irony, for Joseph needed no engine and no wings, only the name of God to lift him where he knelt. His feast is celebrated on the eighteenth of September.
St. Mariam Thresia Chiramel Mankidiyan — The Kerala Mystic
Along the inland waterways of Kerala, in the village of Puthenchira in the Trichur district, there lived in the closing decades of the nineteenth century and the opening decades of the twentieth a woman whose interior life was so consumed by participation in the sufferings of Christ that the spiritual warfare surrounding her became visible to those around her — not as metaphor, not as pious impression, but as physical reality witnessed and attested by her companions, her confessors, and the ecclesiastical authorities who examined her over many years.
Mariam Thresia Chiramel Mankidiyan was born in 1876 into a Syro-Malabar Catholic family, the third of six children. Her father drank; her home was not easy; and the faith she developed was not the quiet devotion of a sheltered life but something forged in suffering, patient, unsentimental, and fierce. From childhood she was given to long hours of prayer, often prostrate before the cross through the night, and as she grew into young womanhood the mystical phenomena intensified to a degree that alarmed both her family and her confessor. She began to bear the five wounds of Christ — the invisible stigmata — wounds felt in her hands, feet, and side, whose pain was real but left no external mark. She experienced the crown of thorns. On multiple occasions her companions found her kneeling in prayer and lifted clear of the ground, held in the air in an ecstasy from which she could not easily be recalled.
But the more extraordinary and disturbing dimension of her life was the demonic. Mariam Thresia was subjected to physical attacks of violent intensity — thrown against walls, beaten, dragged, her body bearing the marks of blows that no human hand had delivered. These attacks occurred not in private but before witnesses: her fellow Sisters in the congregation she founded, servants in the households where she ministered, and priests who came to investigate. The assaults were not trembling subjective impressions but events accompanied by noise, by visible physical displacement, and by marks on her body. Her confessors and superiors reported them to the Bishop of Trichur, who appointed a commission to examine her case. The examination lasted years. The commission concluded that the phenomena were genuine, that the woman's virtue was extraordinary, and that she was to be given every support.
She founded the Congregation of the Holy Family in 1914, a community devoted to the spiritual care of families, and directed it with the practical intelligence of a woman who knew suffering from within and had made of it a source of compassion rather than bitterness. She died in 1926, worn by decades of mystical affliction and apostolic labour. Pope St. John Paul II beatified her in 2000, and Pope Francis canonised her in Rome on the fourteenth of October 2019, alongside four others — the first canonisation ceremony of that pontificate to be held on a weekday, so large were the crowds. For the Catholics of Kerala, and particularly the Syro-Malabar Church in which she was nurtured, she stands as the most recent of the great mystical witnesses: a woman of the twentieth century who bore in her own body, before the eyes of her community, the marks of the Passion and the warfare of the spirit.
St. Padre Pio: The Most Investigated Mystic in Modern History
Francesco Forgione was born in 1887 in Pietrelcina, a small village in the south of Italy. He became a Capuchin friar and took the name Pio. In 1918, in the church of Our Lady of Grace at San Giovanni Rotondo, he received the stigmata — the five wounds of Christ — which remained visible and bleeding for fifty years, until the day before his death in 1968. He is the first priest in the history of the Church to receive the full stigmata.
But the miracles associated with Padre Pio go far beyond the stigmata. They include:
Healing: Thousands of healings were attributed to his intercession, both during his lifetime and after his death. Many are documented in the files of the Holy Office, which monitored him for decades with a mixture of suspicion and wonder. Among the most famous: Gemma di Giorgi, born without pupils in her eyes — a congenital impossibility of natural remedy — who received sight through Padre Pio's intercession and prayer.
Bilocation: Hundreds of witnesses testified to encountering him at great distances from San Giovanni Rotondo while he was simultaneously seen at the friary. During the Second World War, Allied pilots reported a large brown-habited figure appearing in the sky over the town and turning them away from bombing it.
Reading of souls: At the confessional, he regularly named the sins of penitents before they spoke them — a gift documented by thousands of confessors and verified by subsequent investigation.
The fragrance: The inexplicable scent associated with his presence — experienced by witnesses near and far, living and dying — remains one of the most widely attested phenomena in his cause.
Padre Pio was investigated repeatedly by the Holy Office — sometimes with genuine hostility — and was subjected to restrictions on his ministry for years. The investigations could not disprove what thousands witnessed. He was beatified by John Paul II in 1999 and canonised in 2002. His feast is celebrated on 23 September.
"Pray, hope, and don't worry. Worry is useless. God is merciful and will hear your prayer." — St. Padre Pio of Pietrelcina
The Miraculous Medal and the Conversion of Alphonse Ratisbonne — Rome, 1842
In January 1842, Alphonse Ratisbonne — a wealthy young French Jewish banker, fiercely anti-Catholic, engaged to be married — was challenged by a Catholic acquaintance to wear the Miraculous Medal for a month. He accepted the challenge contemptuously, as proof that Catholic devotions had no power over him.
On 20 January 1842, while waiting in the church of Sant'Andrea delle Fratte in Rome for a friend to arrange a funeral, Ratisbonne experienced a vision of the Blessed Virgin Mary — the same vision that had appeared to St. Catherine LabourΓ© in 1830 and had inspired the Miraculous Medal. The vision lasted only a few seconds. It changed everything.
He was received into the Catholic Church within days. He later became a priest, founded a religious congregation devoted to the conversion of his own people, and spent the rest of his life in the Holy Land. Two Cardinals and numerous witnesses testified to his transformation. Pope Gregory XVI personally examined the case and declared it an authentic miracle.
Ratisbonne spent the rest of his long life attempting to describe what he had experienced in those few seconds in the church. He was never fully able to. He said only: "I had barely entered the church when a sudden terror seized me... I raised my eyes; the whole building had disappeared. One single chapel had gathered all the light; and in the midst of this radiance appeared the Virgin Mary... full of majesty and of gentleness."
✝ PART VI — MIRACLES AND THE CANONISATION PROCESS ✝
Why Two Miracles Are Required
The requirement of two verified miracles for canonisation — one for beatification (in most cases) and one for canonisation — is not arbitrary. It reflects the Church's deep theological seriousness about what she is doing when she canonises a saint.
Canonisation is an infallible declaration. The Pope, speaking with the full authority of the Petrine ministry on behalf of the universal Church, declares definitively: this person is in heaven. This is not an opinion, not a probability, not a pastoral judgment. It is an act of the Church's teaching authority on a specific, particular, verifiable fact.
The miracles serve as God's own confirmation of the Church's judgment. They are, in the theological tradition, God's answer to the Church's question: Is this person with you? The miracle is the answer: Yes.
This is why the miracles must be verified after the person's death — during life, one cannot be certain. It is why they must be worked through the specific invocation of the candidate — so that the connection between the miracle and the person is clear. It is why they are investigated with such rigour — because the Church is not making a human judgment but confirming a divine one.
St. Thomas Aquinas, in his Summa Theologiae (II-II, q.178), treats miracles worked by the saints as gratiae gratis datae — graces given freely, not for the sanctification of the recipient but for the building up of the Church. The miracle is not the saint's private achievement. It is God's gift through the saint, for the benefit of others.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church on Miracles
The Catechism treats miracles as signs of the Kingdom of God — signs that the age of salvation has arrived, that God is truly present in His Church, that the promises of Christ are being fulfilled:
"The miracles of Christ and of the saints, prophecy, the Church's growth and holiness, and her fruitfulness and stability 'are the most certain signs of divine Revelation, adapted to the intelligence of all.'" — CCC §156
Miracles are not simply proofs for sceptics. They are signs for believers — reminders that the invisible world is real, that God is near, that prayer reaches heaven, that the saints who have gone before us are still present, still caring, still powerful in their intercession.
✝ PART VII — MIRACLES TODAY ✝
The God Who Still Acts
There are those who imagine that miracles belong to an earlier, more credulous age — that modern science has made them implausible, that the progress of medicine has made them unnecessary, that the sophisticated Catholic embarrassed by the miraculous is somehow more intellectually honest than his ancestors.
This is not the position of the Church. It is not the position of any Pope who has ever occupied the Chair of Peter. It is not the position of a single Doctor of the Church. And it is not the evidence.
The Lourdes Medical Bureau has verified miracles in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries using the most rigorous scientific standards available. Cases continue to be investigated and verified. The Dicastery for the Causes of Saints continues to examine miracles attributed to candidates for beatification and canonisation — miracles occurring today, in our own time, in our own world, in hospitals with modern diagnostic equipment and specialist physicians who certify what they cannot explain.
Pope St. John Paul II said in his homily for the canonisation of St. Edith Stein in 1998:
"The divine Redeemer wishes to penetrate the soul of every suffering person through his heart pierced on the Cross... The miraculous and the holy belong to the permanent endowment of the Church."
The miracles have not stopped. God has not grown distant. The saints have not fallen silent. The prayers of the faithful still rise like incense before the throne — as St. John the Apostle saw in his vision on Patmos (Revelation 8:3–4) — and the God who hears them still answers, still acts, still breaks through the ordinary with the extraordinary, still says to the world: I am here. I love you. Nothing is impossible for Me.
The Invitation
Every miracle in the Church's history carries an invitation within it.
Not merely the invitation to believe that the miracle happened — though that is important. The deeper invitation: to bring your impossibility to God. The disease that will not heal. The marriage that seems beyond repair. The soul that seems beyond conversion. The grief that seems beyond consolation. The situation that human power has entirely exhausted.
This is exactly where the saints' intercession begins. Not where things are easy. Where things are impossible.
"With men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible." — Matthew 19:26
The saints know this better than anyone. They lived it. They prayed through their own impossibilities and found God faithful. And from where they stand now — in the fullness of His presence, their prayer purified and perfected by the light of heaven — they are waiting to pray with you and for you.
Ask them. Place your need before them. Then trust the God who stopped the plague above Rome, who healed the man with no hip socket, who raised the dead at Joppa and Nain and Bethany, who has never once, in twenty centuries of His Church's life, left a prayer unanswered in the way that most glorifies His name and most serves His children.
"The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working." — James 5:16
✝ CLOSING PRAYER ✝
O God, wondrous in all Thy saints, who hast adorned Thy Church with the glory of signs and miracles, grant us, through the intercession of all Thy holy ones, faith that moves mountains, hope that endures all things, and the love that makes all things new.
May we who read the record of Thy wonders not merely marvel at what Thou hast done, but trust without limit in what Thou art yet able to do — in our lives, in our families, in our time.
Through Christ, who is the same yesterday, today, and forever. (Hebrews 13:8)
Amen.
"For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord." — Romans 8:38–39
✝ Omnia ad Majorem Dei Gloriam ✝ All for the Greater Glory of God
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