Interview with Vittorio Messori concerning the miraculous healing of Miguel Juan Pellicer’s severed leg

I came across this interview with Vittorio Messori concerning the miraculous healing of Miguel Juan Pellicer’s severed leg. It is in Italian so I have used Google Translate to translate it into English. I hope the author does not mind me recording the translation below.

The only miracle it is impossible not to believe

Stefano Paci interviews Vittorio Messori, on “traces” in 1999. The theme of the article is a miracle, indeed not just any miracle but the miracle par excellence.

In praise of materialism

To amaze, Vittorio Messori is used to. In a country where thirty thousand copies of a volume are enough to make a bestseller, his first book, Hypothesis on Jesus, has sold over a million copies. I don’t pay, he then “kidnapped” the prefect of the former Holy Office, the austere cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, and for a week he subjected him to a real interrogation and recorded the answers. It had never happened in the history of the Church, and the interview book Report on Faith has been at the center of the debate on Catholicism for years. Then, he asked another person his questions, and this time it was the current Pontiff, Pope Wojtyla. Crossing the Threshold of Hope has been translated into 53 languages.

But now, perhaps, Messori has exaggerated. His new book (Il Miracolo, Rizzoli) claims to tell that at least once in history, the prodigy par excellence, that “impossible” miracle about which he is so often ironic, has happened: a severed limb has grown back. Between ten and eleven in the evening of March 29, 1640, a young Spanish peasant, Miguel Juan Pellicer, would wake up again having his leg that had been amputated two and a half years earlier. The miracle – completed through the intercession of Our Lady of Pilar, the most venerated Our Lady of Zaragoza in front of whose sanctuary Miguel Juan had begged for years – took place in the Aragonese village of Calanda, where the young man had returned to greet his parents. A shocking event whose memory was almost lost.

Hard to believe? We played the part of the “devil’s advocate”. In other words, we have posed to Messori, who writes like a journalist but documents himself as a diligent university professor, some of those objections that the common man would formulate on this “impossible miracle”.

Christians believe in miracles, sure. But it seems that God has always given himself a kind of limitation to respect the freedom of man. That is to say, prodigies are never so sensational as to make belief automatic. To explain them, one can always resort to some scientific cause that has not yet been discovered. This miracle, on the other hand, seems completely “impossible”. Do you really believe that an amputated leg has reappeared?

VITTORIO MESSORI: I don’t deny it, this miracle is disconcerting. It was for me too. In reality, I too had a pattern in mind, and the discovery of this prodigy put him in crisis. Mine was Pascal’s scheme: God does not impose faith, he proposes it. I said to myself: if God performed a “miracle spectacle”, if he made a cut limb grow back, our freedom would be annulled, we would be cornered and we would have to surrender to the evidence.

So, when I found rare hints of this miracle that took place in the village of Calanda, I didn’t feel compelled to deepen it, I didn’t take it seriously. I myself did not want to give up until, studying the documents, I found the indubitability of the fact. In the end I spread my arms: I accepted the mystery, because the evidence forced me to do so. It is the most reasonable way to use reason.

However, a similar miracle had never happened in history: it is as if here, God, had slipped his hand …

MESSORI: Or, if it’s possible to joke about it, the leg had escaped. Yes, it is true, it is a unique case: in this case God went beyond what he always did, both before and after. I have studied for a long time the 65 miracles recognized in Lourdes. In all of them I have always found this sort of strategy of the Deus absconditus. Even in the most sensational ones there are excellent reasons to believe, but there are always loopholes for not believing. There is the case of Peter van Rudder, the Belgian whose broken leg was miraculously reconstructed and six centimeters of bone reformed. The miracle, however, can only be seen with x-rays, and one can say: maybe it wasn’t really broken. So much so that Émile Zola, in front of the Lourdes grotto, said, mockingly: “Here I see many crutches, but no wooden legs”. Instead, at least once in history,

And, even more extraordinary, the miracle is perfectly documented: 62 hours after the event this was registered by the deed of a royal notary. At the trial before the court of the archbishopric of Zaragoza, dozens of sworn witnesses paraded, but thousands of other people could have testified: the prodigy was a public fact. The miraculous young man was a maimed whom all of Zaragoza for two and a half years had seen every day at the same door at the same door asking for alms.

As extraordinary as it is, the fact is so firmly attested that if we deny that until 10 pm on March 29, 1640 Miguel Juan Pellicer had only one leg, and half an hour later he had two, we would have to deny the story itself. I know, the existence of Napoleon.

All right, a notary certified the miracle. But the miracle happened centuries ago, and we know how things were in those times. The testimonies that document it will not be so certain

MESSORI: The deed of the royal notary, Dr. Miguel Andréu, drawn up following every rule of law, is unassailable. And, historically, it is a guarantee of extraordinary value that an event of this kind took place at that time in Aragon, home of the Spanish Inquisition, then at the height of its power. The Inquisition was an institution dictated by the rationalism of the Catholic religion, and much more than heresy it feared and repressed superstition, false miracles. He was absolutely relentless in intervening where there was even the mere suspicion of visionaries or heralds of bogus prodigies. Suffice it to say that in the centuries in which the Inquisition controls Spain there is no news of Marian apparitions, contrary to what happens in Italy, France or Germany.

Thus in the long, rigorous canonical process that began two months just after the event in the diocese of Zaragoza, one feels that the archbishop has the breath of the great inquisitor on his neck. Suffice it to recall that the great inquisitor of Spain put the cardinal archbishop of Toledo in jail. The court of the Inquisition was called the “Supreme” because it had an almost omnipotent power, and could put even the king in trouble.

The fact that the Inquisition allows the trial to unfold and that the prodigy is even proclaimed, on April 27, 1641, is an absolutely extraordinary guarantee for the historian.

Documents on this prodigy, therefore, there are galore. But do documents dating back to the seventeenth century have the same historical validity as an investigation made today?

MESSORI: No, not the same: major. Today that rigor of historical investigation has probably been lost, and if we wanted to reconstruct the story on the pages of the newspapers, we would stay fresh. The process did not take place in the Middle Ages, but a century after the Council of Trent and under the pontificate of Urban VIII who had just then issued new, rigorous rules for the recognition of miracles. The rules with which that process takes place are the same that will be used for more than three centuries, until after Vatican II. And the archbishop’s problem was not to find witnesses, but to limit their number. The miraculous man – a young man of twenty-three with a cut leg who for two and a half years always remains in the same place, at the entrance to the sanctuary of the Madonna del Pilar, where by tradition the inhabitants of Zaragoza go every day – he had become a character that everyone knew. In favor of the historical guarantee there is also the fact that no voice of doubt or hesitation has ever been raised. And all this without any profit: Calanda has never become a Lourdes or a Fatima.

What if it was a twin, or a Miguel Juan Pellicer lookalike?

MESSORI: Not a twin, because the parish registers of Calanda have been preserved, and Miguel Juan Pellicer had no twin. In the dozens of pages of the process, the whole family situation is examined and all possible questions are asked, even the most insidious. A double, on the other hand… came out from where? And how do you fool suspicious fellow villagers? And, above all, why? This is a free miracle where no one earns anything, not even the family. Philip IV, the king of all Spain – there was still the empire on which the sun never set – after the trial he knelt to kiss the healed leg of this peasant, but Miguel Juan was never given a pension : dies as a beggar as he had lived.

The boy was recognized by all, and had been operated on by the most famous surgeon of Zaragoza, Professor Estanga, assisted by two excellent doctors and three nurses: there was also a priest, administrator of the hospital. Everyone testified at the trial, also talking about the place where the cut leg was buried, according to custom. Those who gave him alms recalled that not only did Miguel Juan not hide his leg, but that he showed the stump with the healed wound to exhort alms.

In short, according to her it is impossible not to believe in this miracle. Are you really convinced that there is no room for disbelief this time?

MESSORI: There are no doubts and, I repeat, I gave up with difficulty. I have studied the case for years and have spared no time, effort and travel. What I wrote is a history book, a story that, however, clashes with the mystery. Any historian would jump for joy if the events he studies were attested in this way, with such richness and documentary security.

But if everything is so evident, so perfectly documented and incontrovertible, why has such a sensational miracle been forgotten for so long?

MESSORI: 1640 is not a year like any other for Spain. In the history manuals it is indicated as the dividing line in which the rapid and ruinous decline of Spanish rule and its political and economic influence begins. A few weeks after el gran milagro, two terrible insurrections break out: Portugal breaks away from Spain, and at the same time Catalonia also rises. In that year the defeats of the Spanish regiments begin in Flanders. There are also insurrections in Spanish Italy: Masaniello leads the revolt in the Kingdom of Naples. It is the year in which the count-duke Gaspar de Olivares, the one mentioned in the Promessi sposi, wrote to the king: “We do not know if there will still be a Spain next year”. And the plague and famine arrived: everything conspired to make this miracle little known outside the country. Then came the centuries of the Enlightenment and scientism, who did everything to hide it, because it was embarrassing. It was the exact answer to what was asked by all the Voltaires of the time: to be able to see a recovered leg.

According to the testimonies, Miguel Juan Pellicer’s “miraculous” leg has not, if we can say so, regrown: it is precisely the same leg that had been amputated more than two years earlier – and which, buried in the earth, was necessarily rotten- to have reappeared. A kind of resurrection of the flesh that took place before the end of time. This seems harder to believe …

MESSORI: Yes, the leg was immediately recognized. It had all the unmistakable signs that were on the amputated limb: the scar caused by the wagon wheel that had fractured the tibia in the accident that had resulted in the amputation, the traces of a dog bite on the calf, the remains of a large cyst removed, two deep scratches left by a thorny plant. In short, a leg cut when it was already devoured by gangrene and buried for two and a half years in the cemetery of the hospital in Zaragoza, is suddenly replanted in Calanda, one hundred kilometers away. When they went to check the place where the limb had been buried, they found the hole empty. The first few days the leg, according to the testimonies, looked like dead flesh: it was cold, bluish. Over time, and the flow of blood, he returned to normal.

Perhaps, if this miracle remained hidden for so long, it is because we, the people of today, needed it. Because this prodigy is not just a sign of God’s existence: it is a sign of healthy Christian materialism. And what threatens Catholicism today is certainly not materialism, but spiritualism, gnosis: much of the new Catholic theology is a Gnostic theology.

This is a “theologically incorrect” miracle because it contrasts with the realm of spiritualism that threatens us. Just any Plato is enough to believe in the immortality of the soul. Christians, on the other hand, believe in the resurrection of bodies, precisely what so much theology today no longer announces.

What were the reactions to your book?

MESSORIES: Textbook. Even before the book came out, three publisher announcements were enough and Beniamino Placido in la Repubblica wrote an article with a significant title: A book about a miracle: I can’t wait not to read it. Placido, on behalf of the secular intelligentsia, said that it was certainly a hoax, and one shouldn’t waste time and money to read such a book. Prior refusal. In fact, it is the believer who is the true free thinker. Because he has a concept of reason free from ideological cages. As Gilbert Keith Chesterton said: “A believer is a gentleman who accepts a miracle, if the evidence obliges you to do so. A non-believer, on the other hand, is a gentleman who will not even accept to discuss miracles, because the doctrine he professes and which he cannot deny obliges him to do so”.

And the reactions from the Catholic side?

MESSORI: As soon as the book came out, a guru of the Catholic intelligentsia, Enzo Bianchi, prior of the Community of Bose, an up-to-date and theologically correct Catholic, made a ferocious slate on Tuttolibri, the literary insert of the Stampa. He too without confronting the book. He said that whatever was written on it was “useless and harmful”. Useless, because those like him, who have a pure and hard faith, do not need miracles; harmful because prodigies, madonnas, shrines and pilgrims are alienating things for those who have an “adult” faith.

When I read these two reviews, I smiled with pleasure: in the book I predicted exactly these reactions. But I had also foreseen something else: two months after its release, Il Miracolo was in its fourth reprint and many translations are about to be published.