Defending Mary MacKillop Means Bashing Atheists

To be fair to the author, MacKillop was born in 1842 (see WP) and at that time, the aether theory was still alive and well. The Michaelson-Morley experiment which was really the death knell for the aether theory, was performed in 1887 when MacKillop was approximately 45. However even in 1908, the aether wasn’t entirely dead.

But getting back to the Guy Rundle article on Mary MacKillop, it’s not as fawning as other articles on MacKillop I have read in the Australian press. Rundle points out the nature of the scam – Vatican churning out saints like souvenirs and the Order of St Joseph replacing photos of an old woman with a younger, more marketable image. He is a satirist, so expect anything said to be somewhat biting.

What the article lacks is something which troubles me – any kind of critical evaluation of the sainthood process. To an atheist, “saint” is just an abstract term with an element of impossibility, like “posthumous scrabble champion”. So I’m not about to care whether somebody dead is or is not a saint. What’s interesting to me is the process of declaring somebody a saint.

The Vatican needs two “proven” miracles attributable to the candidate, first? What are their standards of proof of a miracle? They must be appallingly low, and if this article is to be believed, they’ve been lowered even further to make it easier for prospective saints to meet the challenge. I read about somebody whose “inoperable lung cancer” was considered cured. Where’s the evidence? And how long did they wait to be sure the miraculous cure was permanent? I imagine it wouldn’t be a good story to hear that the object of somebody’s miracle had died 5 years later from a return of the supposedly divinely cured disease.

They (the Vatican) seem to be making some big assumptions. They need some kind of cure or remission of a disease which can’t be explained by medical science. Well, there’s a lot that medical science can’t explain, but that doesn’t make it miraculous. The Vatican assume that prayer to (some saintly candidate) means that an unexplained remission means that candidate intervened. What about a control group, of patients who got no prayer or prayer to some other dead person? The process lacks falsifiability – so long as they can point to one person who was inexplicably cured, that’s good enough for them. And apparently, for the Australian Press.

Finally, on the “shatteringly empty creed” of Dawkins and Hitchens … like Douglas Adams said, there’s enough beauty in a garden already without having to invent fairies at the bottom of it. I want to live in a world of truth, not one of fantasy, thanks.