Lourdes has recognised just 70 miracle cures, and medicine screens each one

At the shrine of Lourdes, thousands of pilgrims approach the grotto every day and immerse themselves in the water in the hope of being healed. Throughout its history, only 70 cures have been declared miraculous. Between the faith of those who arrive and the signed document lies a medical process that almost nobody passes, and which turns a health case into an official declaration.

What has to happen for a cure to be declared a miracle?

No bishop signs off on a miracle lightly. Declaring a cure requires a prior medical opinion that rules out natural explanations, so that only what science cannot first explain is blessed. Without that screening, any improvement would be a miracle and the word would lose its weight. The filter, then, is not set by faith: it is set by medicine.

Only 70 miracle cures in the shrine's entire history

The figure measures just how exceptional this is: 70 cures declared miraculous at Lourdes, according to the report published in April 2024 on the care the shrine devotes to the sick. Set against the thousands of pilgrims who pass by the grotto every day and the centuries of pilgrimage, the filter lets through only a handful of cases. Most of those who bathe in the water go home the same way they arrived.

Nobody counts the misfortunes that don't fit

Here the classic objection arises: if remarkable cures are recorded, why aren't inexplicable misfortunes recorded too? Those who point out that only the successes are counted are highlighting the same bias that runs through any story built after the fact: what confirms is remembered and what disproves is forgotten. On the other side stands the opposing argument, from those who stress that an attributed cure occurs without the long list of adverse effects of conventional medicine.

The case of Chiara Badano and other attributed cures

Alongside the shrine's official declarations, other episodes of attributed healing circulate, such as that of Chiara Badano, who was left paraplegic after a skiing accident and walked out of hospital after a novena. These cases, without the backing of a complete file, work as a parallel narrative: they feed expectations of the miraculous without going through the same filter. The list also includes the miracle that a bishop in Honduras recognised around a relic.

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The numbers don't add up on any side. Thousands of sick people every day, a grotto that never stops flowing with water, and seventy names on the list. If miracles depended on faith or on the will of those who pray, the arithmetic would be different.