More on St. Dominic and Miracles

The following are from Miracles And Manifestations Of The Holy Spirit In The History Of The Church, taken from page 110 of the Kindle edition.

Summary of Miracles Attributed to St. Dominic

One day, preaching before a church against the heresies of the day, St. Dominic found himself, with a brother from the Cistercian convent, suddenly transported into the church, without any one having opened the door.  At another time his valise and books fell into a river, and when, after several days, they were "fished up again", they were not even wetted.  Often while traveling the rain fell in torrents, without one single drop falling on him, that he might reach his journey's end quite dry.  As he never took money about with him, he had to ask free passage across ferries.  On one occasion the boatman refused to ferry him across without his fare; so he lifted his eyes to heaven, and found at his feet the required money.  In the convent of St. Vincent of Caatreg, the cruficix spoke to him, and told him to persevere in well-doing, and to remember that saints were made perfect by suffering.  In the same place, while at mass, his fervor was so great that he was lifted into the air full five feet from the ground, of which fact the prior himself and the canons were personal witnesses.  He saved miraculously from drowning forty English pilgrims going to St. James's, who had entered a boat too weak and had been thrown into the Garonne.

Brewer, Dictionary of Miracles, pp. 231-232.
Citing Les Petits Bollandistes, Vol 9, p. 284.

Raising the Dead

The son of a matron died while his mother was listening to a sermon by St. Dominic. the dead body was taken to the monk and laid at his feet.  The "blessed father", moved with compassion, made on the lad the sign of the cross, and taking him by the hand, the dead child rose, stood on his feet, and returned home in perfect health. 

A carpenter, working in the convent of St. Sistus, fell into a pit, and the earth falling on him crushed him to death.  St. Dominic ordered him to be dug out, prayed overe him, and he returned to life wholly unhurt.

The nephew of Cardinal Stephen, whose name was Neapolion, being thrown from his horse, had his neck broke, and was killed.  St. Dominic, going to the spot of the accident, prayed thrice, saying the same words; then taking the young man by the hand, he said with a loud voice, "Neapolion, I say unto you, in the name of Christ, Arise."  Forthwith he arose, and St. Dominic led him to his uncle.

Brewer, Dictionary of Miracles, pp. 80-81.
Citing Edward Kinesman, Lives of the Saints, 1623.

"If God Does Not Show Up, We're Dead"

by guest blogger, Sherry W

The following was originally published on the Siena.org blog, 28 April 2011 
 
In the spirit of the season, I have a book on order about 100 Catholics saints who raised the dead.

I know. It is really out there. Jesus rising from the dead - OK. Even the idea of saints doing it spooks us a bit. And as for just plain Christians experiencing God raising the dead? Yeah, right.
It came as a surprise to me to discover that it has always been a rare but real part of the Christian experience. The ultimate experience of resurrection life.

My first real life exposure was years ago when I was doing gifts interviews in Washington DC and a woman came in who had had an extraordinary healing ministry for 30 years. When I asked her to tell me a story, she told me about praying for a man who rose from the dead. We hear hundreds of amazing and inspiring stories in the Called & Gifted process but this was one of those jaw-dropping moments. I tried to appear calm and pretend that I had heard stories like this before although I was inwardly skeptical. Darn. She really wanted to talk about other things so I never did hear exactly what happened.

(I had a similar experience not too long ago when I finally heard someone tell of having an experience of bi-location. As she pointed out, I do joke in workshops about my desire to hear bi-location stories, but I never expected anyone to take me up on it. 65,000+ have gone through the Called & Gifted process and I finally stumbled across someone who seems to have experienced bi-location. That percentage seems about right.)

And then there was the time in Rome, when Fr. Michael Sweeney and I and our OP host were standing jammed upright in a Roman bus famous for its crowds and its pick-pockets. I had my purse firmly clapsed under my arm and my arms rigidly down at my side when our guide casually nodded his head toward a church that we were passing and said "Oh, and that's where St. Dominic raised the boy from the dead." "Wait!" I squealed inwardly as I desperately tried to turn my wedged body so that I could see what he was referring to but we had passed the spot by before I managed to extract myself.
Another tantalizing almost-brush with resurrection.

Bl Jordan of Saxony, who followed St. Dominic as Master of the Order, wrote a very sober account of the miracle which was witnessed by a number of intelligent Dominicans.

"It happened that, once while he was in Rome, a young man, related to the Lord Cardinal Stephen of Fossa Nuova, was riding recklessly down a steep hill and thrown from his horse. While he was being carried away, it was hard to tell whether he was still alive or dead. As the crowd which had gathered was displaying its grief with wails and lamentations, Master Dominic happened along with Brother Tancred, a good, fervant man and one prior in Rome; in fact, it was he who told me of this incident. Brother Tancred said to him, "Why do you hesitate? Why don't you call on the Lord? Where is your pity for your neighbor, your confidence in God?" 

Stirred by these words and inflamed by the fire of his own ardent compassion, he ordered that the young man be brought to a nearby house. There he restored him to life by his prayers and personally led him out of the house in the sight of those who had gathered."
He had expired. That is what I heard from his parents, who lived in the Roman Campagna.)

Wow. A Dominican whose instinctive response to a fatal injury was "Why do you hesitate to pray for life? Where is your pity for your neighbor, your confidence in God?"

Suddenly, it doesn't all seem so freaky.

And then I started to hear confirmed stories from sober people that Christians were starting to see people raised from the dead in significant numbers around the world.

And then I heard about Heidi and Rolland Baker, missionaries to Mozambique. Watch this short 2008 CBN interview with Heidi about the extraordinary things that she and her co-workers are seeing in northern Mozambique. Mother of over 7,000 abandoned and impoverished children, faced daily with a level of suffering and chaos that is almost indescribable, Heidi puts it bluntly "If God does not show up, we're dead." 

And she talks very simply about how hard it is for western Christians to be open to the miraculous.

To be desperate enough, hungry enough, humble enough to pursue God instead of depending upon our own considerable resources.

It was said of St. Dominic that he spent his days talking to people about God and his nights talking with God about people. It was his passionate longing for and pursuit of God that made it seem perfectly sane to his closest companions that he could and should pray for God to raise a young man who had died in a tragic accident.

But the question that haunts me is am I that open to God's manifest presence as St. Dominic and his early companions or as Heidi Baker is? Or am I just fine doing the conventional, educated, middle class western thing: depending entirely on my own resources? What more would God give the world through his Church if we were that desperate, that humble, that open?

Why doesn't God heal all the faithful?

Today's Gospel reading in the Ordinary Form of the Roman Rite is Mark 2:12: Jesus' healing of the paralytic brought to him by four men who, because of the crowd inside and around the door, cut a hole in the roof of Jesus' own home and lowered the poor fellow down. If it had been my home, my first thought would have been to look for the guy who should get the repair bill. But true to form, Jesus is not said to have cared about that. Nor does it even seem that his primary concern was the physical healing he did. His concern was with the forgiveness of sins. Addressing those who thought him blasphemous for presuming to forgive sins, he uttered: "But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority to forgive sins on earth," and then said to the paralytic: "Rise, pick up your mat, and go home." That suggests a connection on which we need to meditate if we are to answer the question "Why doesn't God heal all the faithful?"

Together, the four Gospels leave no doubt that it is faith in the Lord which heals people. Conversely, lack of faith in Him hinders healing (Mark 6:5). But whose faith? Not the Son of Man's faith, which is indeed necessary but also a given; the key, rather, is the faith of the believing community. Other Gospel stories, such as that of the healing of the centurion's servant (Matthew 8: 5-14), as well as the experience of the faithful through the centuries, indicate that the needed communal faith can be wholly vicarious: the one healed hasn't done or professed a thing to be healed, but rather benefits from the faith-filled intercession of others. Indeed, today's passage from Mark says that it was because of "their faith" that Jesus undertook to heal the paralytic. It isn't made clear whether the paralytic himself was included in "their," but that hardly matters. What seems to matter is the aura and energy of faith with which the person in need of healing is surrounded. That's why faith-communities in which belief in miracles is lively tend to get more miracles. Indeed, it can safely be said that the more faith a body of believers has, and the more that is manifested in loving intercession for each other, the more medically inexplicable healings will occur.

But that doesn't mean there's a law of nature we can derive accordingly. We cannot say: "Miraculous healings vary directly with the level of faith in the community." For one thing, neither variable of the equation is can be measured with the requisite precision; for another, God's sovereign freedom in manifesting his irrevocable grace cannot be circumscribed. In any event, grace in the primary sense is God's self-communication of his life to us, so that we may become "partakers of the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4). So understood, grace is supernatural, "beyond" mere nature, and so does not work in quite the same way as those regularities which we call "laws of nature."

Nevertheless, there is a kind of predictable regularity to God's mercy. The divine life he won for us by his Pasch is always on offer, because it is offered to all and suffices for all. Divine mercy is simply divine grace as received by sinners; Jesus came to save "sinners" not the righteous, and "all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God." So his mercy is manifest whenever we receive him in faith and repentance, as countless people have done and will do. Some experience it only vicariously, e.g., those among the baptized who die before reaching the age of reason. And as we have seen, miraculous physical healings testify to God's mercy in healing our souls, i.e. bestowing his transformative mercy on us. Yet most of the fervently faithful who are sick or disabled do not experience miraculous healing of their physical maladies. How can that be, if faith fosters miracles and only lack of faith hinders them?

Well, the kind of miracle we're talking about has to be relatively rare. The term 'miracle' is from the Latin for 'something to be marvelled at', and what is to be marvelled at here is precisely a striking departure from the laws of nature. That is only to be expected in a world in which grace supervenes on and elevates nature without replacing it. For if the workings of divine grace abolished the laws of nature, there would be no Nature. But whatever our ultimate end, we are now and necessarily part of Nature; so if Nature were forthwith abolished, there would nothing in us for grace to elevate.

Yet the Gospels make quite clear to us that miraculous healings are outward signs of God's mercy. As such, they not only depend on faith but are meant to elicit faith. They are by no means the most frequent occurrences in human life or even ecclesial life; rather, like the "seven" sacraments, they are communal signs that help to bring about the realities they signify. As shown already, one of the realities which miracles of healing, as "sacramental" realities, both signify and bring about is faith. Now faith is a virtue, an habitual response to God. But as such, it is also and necessarily a gift: a manifestation of grace in the fundamental sense, i.e. God's life in us making it possible for us to attain such deep intimacy with him that we can undergo theosis, divinization.

When that life is fully manifest in God's people on the Last Day, there will be no more physical maladies, indeed no more death. God will have healed all the faithful, who will have been liberated from "this body of death" (Romans 7:24) and given new, "spiritual" bodies (1 Corinthians 15:44). But on our earthly pilgrimage, we must learn above all to die to self and live to God. That is our baptismal vocation; that is our initiation into the very life of God, our apprenticeship as partakers of the divine nature. When accepted in loving surrender to God, the unavoidable physical realities of sickness and death are meant to help all die to self. Even when the one afflicted has never had the capacity or opportunity to commit sin, they are an invitation, a sign, to the rest of us of what each of us must do in faith and love. Yet, when sought and received in deep faith, miracles of physical healing manifest and help to bring about that life into which dying to self is the point of entry. They help to keep us faltering pilgrims in via ad patriam.