When is a Miracle a Miracle?

Miracles, like much else in the Catholic church, aren't what they used to be. The French shrine of Lourdes has often been likened to a religious theme park, offering package tours and souvenirs for the millions of pilgrims who arrive each year, many of them sick and desperate to experience or at least witness a miracle.

As modern medicine raises the barrier on what can be deemed a sudden miraculous recovery, the Catholic church is having to modernise. Now Catholicism's leading shrine, which hosts some 6 million pilgrims each year, is considering a new category of religious experience: "miracle lite".

Every year, dozens of seriously ill people leave the grotto in south-western France where the Virgin Mary reportedly appeared to a local girl in 1858, convinced they have been cured. But the church does not rate their cases as miracles because strict rules from the 1700s say that doctors must acknowledge their ailments could not have been remedied. Modern medicine, however, increasingly refuses to declare any disease incurable.

Bishop Jacques Perrier proposes a new category of "authentic healings", so those that recover can share the story of their physical and spiritual experiences with others. The rule for declaring miracles would not have to change, he said.

While the Catholic church teaches that God sometimes performs miracles, including cures, which doctors cannot explain, sceptics reject this as unscientific and explain that sudden recoveries as psychological phenomena or the delayed result of earlier treatment.

"Doctors today speak in statistical terms, saying, for example, that the chances of recovery are very slim. They have a very hard time saying a disease is completely incurable," he told Reuters.

"Most healings may fail to meet this or that criterion for a miracle. We want to get recognition for a category of authentic healings linked to Lourdes."

Bishop Perrier said he was working on a new category of Lourdes healings to put before the Vatican for approval. He insisted it was not an attempt to boost pilgrimages to the shrine. "There has been no decline in visits," he said.

He explained that those allegedly cured during a Lourdes visit but not declared miracles do not gain church approval to share their story in public, for example at retreats or meetings with fellow Catholics.

Of the millions who visit the Pyrenean place of pilgrimage each year, some 7,000 have claimed to have been cured since the medical bureau began keeping records in 1883 - only 66 are deemed miracles.

Bishop Perrier said the shrine's International Medical Committee examined possible miracle cases and rejected most of them. The last official miracle - a man "healed" of multiple sclerosis - was declared in 1999, after 12 years of inquiries. Sometimes the site's 20 doctors see a sick person has been healed inexplicably, but do not draw further conclusions, he said.

"What we want is to authenticate these healings and say that the people who say they have been healed are not making it up or swindling people," he said.

Taking the waters

· Lourdes became famous in 1858 after the Virgin Mary appeared 18 times to Bernadette Soubirous, 14. Her message was: "Pray and do penance for the conversion of the world".

· Medical bureau set up in 1882 to establish authenticity. Doctors were invited to examine the miracles.

· In 1899, after Gabriel Gargam was paralysed in a crash, he was dipped in a pool but then started walking again.

· Royal Marine John Traynor was wounded in world war one. In 1923, he was dipped in a bath nine times. His paralysed legs then supported him again.