Baltimore Archdiocese investigates possible Seelos miracle

That’s what Mary Ellen Heibel’s doctors at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington told her May 11, 2004, after they discovered that the cancer that had attacked Heibel’s esophagus in 2003 and then a lymph node later that year had spread throughout her body.

Given about six months, the longtime parishioner of St. Mary in Annapolis underwent a new form of chemotherapy at The John Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore as a palliative treatment to extend her life. But doctors warned it would only postpone the inevitable.

At the suggestion of a Pittsburgh priest, Heibel began praying a novena in 2005 to Blessed Francis X. Seelos – a 19th-century Redemptorist pastor of her parish who died of yellow fever in 1867 in New Orleans.

One week after she began the novena at her parish, Heibel’s cancer disappeared. Gone were tumors in both lungs, her liver, back and sternum. When Dr. Michael Gibson, her doctor at Hopkins, called with the news, Heibel couldn’t believe it.

“I was just so excited. I called everyone,” the 71-year-old mother of four remembered. “I never thought in a million years this would happen.”

Told by her doctors that the unexplained healing could not be the result of her chemotherapy, Heibel is convinced that Blessed Seelos interceded on her behalf.

Archdiocesan officials are now investigating whether Heibel might just be right.

Archbishop Edwin F. O’Brien opened an archdiocesan inquiry into the alleged healing May 19.

This is a tough one. The seven criteria for a miracle to be able to count for beatification or canonization include the requirement that no treatment for the (incurable) disease may have been given or that any treatment that was given has to be merely palliative.

But giving palliative chemotherapy, it seems to me as a laymen, straddles the line. The point of this criterion is to eliminate one more among many variables. A miracle is defined as something that truly happened but for which we have no natural/medical explanation. Therefore, one of the seven criteria is that the disease must be incurable, that is, no known cure exists. Because, if a known cure exists, even if that cure was not applied, medical science does know how to cure that disease and thus, on the off chance that somehow, invisibly to use, the conditions that are known to cure the disease might somehow have occurred, curable diseases are rule out of bounds for beatification/canonization cases.

Similarly, another criterion is that the recovery must be relatively instantaneous. This is to rule out the possibility of some gradual, unintended natural remission or recovery. If the recovery takes place very quickly, the likelihood that some combination of nutrition or rest or who knows what, over a long term, somehow cured the disease is ruled out. We are not saying that that’s what happened—indeed, even a gradual long-term cure of an incurable disease might be the result of divine intervention, but we want to rule out even the appearance of some unintended, mysterious natural cure.

So, that’s why the criteria include “no attempt to treat the disease” or merely palliative treatments—on the off chance that the cure of the disease was the result of medical intervention.

So this case would turn on the meaning of palliative. In the case of the infant whose cure cleared the way for the canonization of Mother Cabrini—a newborn whose eyes were burned away by a mistakenly applied 50% silver nitrate solution instead of the 2%?? (in any case, very dilute) solution used to prevent infections—the baby was given “palliative treatment” that consisted of cold compresses to try to relieve the pain. Now no one would ever imagine that that palliative treatment might have restored his eyes to perfection by the next morning. So that miracle “counts.”

But in this case, the palliative treatment involved chemotherapy. The doctors expected that it could do nothing to cure the cancer and declared the patient terminally ill, yes. But how can one prove beyond doubt that what was intended palliatively (and intended to be palliative by affecting the tumor?) did not act more than palliatively??

I’d be perfectly willing privately to consider this a miracle—the doctors said the patient had no hope of survival. But in terms of the strict criteria for a medical miracle needed for beatification or canonization (rules laid down by Benedict XIV in the 1700s, before he became pope), I think it’s quite problematic. The reason the Church is so fussy about this stuff, ruling out what do seem to be miracles in common sense, is that in the 1700s the Church was ridiculed for believing in saints and miracles and wanted to be sure that when She put her stamp of approval on a canonization miracle, the stamp of approval rested on a watertight scientific case. To get a watertight scientific case you have to bend over backwards to rule out even the slightest possibility of a “natural” explanation.

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