Radio takes over Meddysong to complain about miracles…
I want to blog about this because I’m *seriously* wound up, but I don’t dare write it on my own blog in case my sister, who I stupidly gave the url to, accidentally reads it and gets upset. Babel has therefore volunteered to let me use his blog, which is very kind of him and may stop me exploding and making a nasty mess everywhere.
The background to this story, is that a couple of months ago the husband of my aunt, who is in his early 40s, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. It was a severe shock to the entire family. Parkinsons is a disease which people typically do not suffer from until they are much more advanced in years, and even the doctors are surprised to have discovered it in someone so young. It’s a degenerative disease, and one for which there is no cure. He has now been provided with appropriate medication which is supposed to slow down the effects of the illness, but it’s all a case of buying time; the prognosis for the future is not good.
Now my family have always been very religious, and their natural reaction in such a circumstance is to say a lot of prayers. Whether or not you believe in God is irrelevant, because praying is normally a fairly harmless practice and it tends to make people feel better. It can, however, be taken to extremes, and even at the most religious points of my life there have been elements of Catholicism which I have found very hard to swallow. Miracles, apparitions, and places of pilgrimage would rank very high up that list.
Anyway, last night we were all sitting in the living room watching tv, and my mother mentioned that she had been talking to my aunt earlier on the phone. My uncle had apparently been very tired on Saturday evening, because they had had a big party for my cousin’s birthday at their house, and it had involved a lot of work. The medication he is taking makes him prone to randomly falling asleep at inopportune moments as well as causing him to feel generally exhausted, so this effect was to be expected.
My mother finished her observation with the phrase, “Please God, he’ll be better soon”. I have to confess that I hadn’t been listening very attentively prior to this, but I made a comment to the effect that I didn’t think he would be feeling much better soon because my understanding was that the side-effects of the medication were supposed to get worse (as he ups the dosage) before they get better. That wasn’t, however, what my mother was getting at.
“No, please God he’ll be cured”, she contradicted me.
This seemed to be to be a rather over-optimistic sort of hope, so I expressed the opinion that I didn’t think that a cure was going to be discovered any time soon. This caused my sister to give me an exasperated look, as if I ought to have known what they were talking about and was being deliberately dense.
“No, she’s praying to Cardinal Newman,” she explained.
I’ve added a link to Wikipedia, because it strikes me that anyone who doesn’t come from Birmingham might be a bit vague as to who Cardinal Newman actually is. We had him forced down our throats a lot at school because the Oratory Church, where he spent some of his ministry, was the local church just around the corner and we used to go there sometimes for Mass on Holy Days of Obligation. It is actually a very impressive church - ornate enough to be a cathedral - and if you are interested in churches I would say it is worth a visit, because it’s the only attractive Catholic church which I have ever encountered in Britain 
As for Cardinal Newman himself, he’s well on the pathway to becoming a saint. That is to say, he’s been beatified, but he’s still in a queue waiting to be canonised. There is essentially a department in the Vatican which deals with applications for the sainthood, the conditions being that the candidate has to be to proven to have performed several miracles after their death. Quite how they prove that something is a miracle I’m not sure, but there’s a lot of collecting of evidence and it’s not a quick process. From what I understand, someone who was sick has to come forward and say they’ve been praying to So-and-So and now they’ve been cured of a terminal illness or paralysis of the like. The person then has to be examined by doctors, and if they can’t find a scientific reason for the healing, it *must* be a miracle.
In any case, I looked at my sister with an air of slight confusion, because I was unaware that my mother had any sort of devotion to Cardinal Newman. He started life as an Anglican, and she’s never too keen on people who have had the misfortune to start life as an Anglican 
“He only needs one more miracle”, my mother explained helpfully. “You know that he’s been beatified?”.
I confirmed that I did indeed know this, whilst trying to project a look which expressed the sentiment “and the relevance of this is…?” without being overtly rude.
“So he only needs one more miracle to be canonized”, clarified my mother further. Right.
Seeing that I still presumably looked a bit confused, my sister added, “What she means is that if he cured Andy, that would be his second miracle”.
“That’s right,” agreed my mother. “I figured there’s more chance if I pray to somebody who *needs* the miracle as opposed to someone who’s already been canonized. Cardinal Newman is more likely to help because it’s in his interests”.
“There’s a special prayer to say”, my sister chipped in. “We’ve got one on a card for you. And instructions on gaining a plenary indulgence. If enough of us do it, it ought to work…”.
I was duly presented with my prayer card, containing a nice picture of Cardinal Newman and instructions as to the sort of prayers I ought to say, and when. Initially I tried to smile politely, but the more attempts were made to coerce me into saying I intended to take part in this charade, the more annoyed I became.
What got to me was the fact that the pair of them genuinely seemed to think this was a solution; that if they pray to this random almost-saint, there’s a realistic chance that our relative will cease to have an incurable disease. It’s so irrational that if someone else had suggested it to me I would simply have laughed and assumed it was a joke. My first concern was to try and stop them saying anything like this to my aunt, as I felt it had the potential to be upsetting.
My second concern was to try and make them see that… erm… it wasn’t going to work. This wasn’t the easiest point in the world to argue without being hurtful, and I didn’t do terribly well 
They pronounced that I had always been a sceptic and regretted that I was so lacking in faith. As things got more heated, they recalled the time we went to Knock and I refused to stand in a queue to touch the piece of stone on which the Virgin Mary allegedly stood, citing as a reason that I didn’t believe it had magic powers. We also discussed a subsequent time we went to Knock, when I suggested it might do my sister more harm than good to hold her injured arm under a running tap of Holy Water in the hope that it was going to heal her. The ultimate conclusion appeared to be that I had been an unpleasant, disbelieving sort of child who had turned into an unpleasant, disbelieving sort of adult and that they would ignore me entirely were it not for the fact that I was in danger of jeapordising the success of the entire mission if Cardinal Newman found out I didn’t believe in him.
It became clear fairly quickly that this wasn’t an argument that I stood any chance of winning. I was so annoyed that I confess I did strike a rather low blow, and say to my mother that I thought she wasn’t going to ask for any more special indulgences after what happened last time she said a novena.. My aunt had had some fairly traumatic experiences trying to have a baby, losing one child and having several miscarriages, so when she was pregnant with my now cousin, my mother and several other relatives decided to say a novena; a special prayer spread over nine days which, if you fulfil certain conditions, is supposed to guarantee that you receive an indulgence. My mother was worried about it at the time, saying she was scared of novenas because somebody told her once that if you said one and God gave you what you wanted, there would always be a price to pay somewhere else in your life. But anyhow she said the novena, my aunt had a healthy baby boy… and then two hours later there was a complication which resulted in her nearly dying. Everyone was convinced that this was the cost of the novena, and there was a general resolution that we weren’t going to meddle in such matters any more.
Now, obviously there was no connection between the novena and what happened to my aunt, but everyone else genuinely believes there is, and have indeed agonised over whether they ought to confess to my aunt that they are to blame. So obviously me making this comment was a little cruel and had the effect of upsetting my mother considerably. By the end of the evening, everybody was refusing to speak to me and sitting drinking wine in silence, so in the end I left the room and gave up
I’m sorry that I’ve upset them all, because that wasn’t my aim, but I just feel totally incredulous that otherwise fairly rational people can believe so strongly in something which is so clearly absolute rubbish. It’s so ridiculous that I don’t even know what else to say. It’s one thing believing in God, it’s quite another believing that saying a prayer to some random dead guy is going to magically cure an incurably sick person. I wish that for once, they could actually listen to someone else’s point of view and *not* conclude that that person is automatically wrong/a heathen if it doesn’t happen to coincide with their own… but that would, indeed, be a miracle
Tags: religion