Our faith helps us believe in miracles, but do science and technology disprove them? To discuss, Father Dave welcomes back friend of the show Jesuit priest and president of the Magis Center, Father Robert Spitzer. His latest book is called, “Christ, Science, and Reason: What We Can Know About Jesus, Mary, and Miracles.”
Father Spitzer was president of Gonzaga University for 11 years, and describes his intellectual journey while attending the school as an undergrad. “I found the Jesuits to be obviously intellectually stimulating at that time. I had some physics professors and good philosophy professors…without those people who took an interest in me and answered my many, many questions, I think I would not be where I am today,” he says.
Father Dave notes that Father Spitzer’s curiosity helps him engage with those who have questions about faith. Father Spitzer says, “I have to admit I’m an analytic and I understand the analytical personality. ‘Ask away,’ is what I say.”
LISTEN: Father Robert Spitzer Explains the Science Behind the Shroud of Turin
“The Blessed Virgin Mary had predicted on three separate occasions that this miracle was going to happen on October 13th when the sun was at its high point,” Father Spitzer explains. “The crowd of 40,000, many of them who were hostile to Catholicism, saw the sun first starting to spin on its own axis.” He describes how the sun emitted different colors, and then appeared to veer towards the earth. Father Spitzer says this phenomena was earth’s atmosphere acting as a lens and says, “It’s refracting and magnifying the sun’s heat and it’s drying the ground. It was raining all night and [this phenomena] was drying the people’s clothes.”
“So the major thing is how could such a lens be out there? Obviously, one theory is it could just be a supernatural lens. Our Lady just went voila and created this lens; that’s certainly possible; she certainly has the power to do that,” Father Spitzer continues. “But on the other hand, physicist Stanley Jaki said, ‘There is one physical explanation you could make. You’d have to bring multiple different, very unusual occurrences together at a single point at the exact time, place, and day that the Blessed Virgin Mary said.”
“The odds of this happening are like [many trillions] to one against. That’s like the monkey typing the first half of Macbeth by random tapping of the keys perfectly in a single try,” he adds. “It was so evident [a miracle occurred] that even the head of the Masons, the biggest paper in Portugal actually put on the front page that the sun did dance at Fatima.”
Next, Father Spitzer discusses Eucharistic miracles, specifically instances where heart tissue was growing out of a consecrated Host. “It has the molecular atomic structure of bread, but growing out of it is clearly a living heart tissue from the upper left ventricle,” he begins. “It has these very interesting macrophages and white blood cells – these are healing cells that normally die when a body is disconnected from an embodied circulatory system.” He notes that these white blood cells would usually die a few hours after being disconnected from a body, but this consecrated Host had these active cells “performing healing functions” as if it is still connected.
“To begin with, you think, ‘Wow, that’s really impossible. How do we know that some guy just didn’t get a piece of heart tissue and attach it to a consecrated Host in some fashion?’” Father Spitzer cites the findings of two scientists Drs. Maria Elżbieta Sobaniec-Łotowska and Stanisław Sulkowski who examined a Eucharistic miracle in Poland.
“They subjected the tissue to electron microscopic analysis, and what they found was that the living heart tissue was connected to the non-living molecular structure of the bread,” Father Spitzer says. “We don’t have the technology to reproduce that with two completely different substances on that refined level.”
