Our Lord Jesus Christ declares to us through Holy Scriptures, "blessed are they that have not seen, and have believed." (John 20:29). This is in reference to the divine and supernatural virtue of Faith. Without such a theological virtue we cannot please God, nor can we attain salvation. It is a gift of God given so that we may believe, by the authority of God and with perfect certitude, that which we cannot see with our eyes or feel through our other four senses.
The question is: Does Our Lord imply here that it is displeasing to God that man tends to need physical proof of the supernatural before he can accept the Faith?
The answer is a resounding "No!". Miracles are a central occurrence in the Holy Scriptures. Christ purposely made use of miracles to make it easy for man to believe, and to prove to men of all following ages that He was God, the long awaited Messiah of the Jewish people, and that His message of the Gospel is true. Our Lord intended for these miracles to make men believe; to make men open for the gift of Faith.
"And coming into his own country, he taught them in their synagogues, so
John the Baptist sent two of his disciples to Jesus. Here we see Christ let
his miracles speak for Him:
"And when the men were come unto him, they said: John the Baptist hath sent
"Then began he to upbraid the cities wherein were done the most of his
"And going, preach, saying: The kingdom of heaven is at hand. Heal the sick,
"And these signs shall follow them that believe: In my name they shall cast
"Jesus said to him: Unless you see signs and wonders, you believe not."
The following are two supporting quotes pertaining to the doctrine of miracles:
"it is natural to man to arrive at the intelligible truth through its
"If anyone should say that no miracles can be performed... or that they can
This intention is made clear in many places in the Bible:
that they wondered and said: How came this man by this wisdom and miracles?"
(Matt 13:54)
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us to thee, saying: Art thou he that is to come; or look we for another?
....And answering, he said to them: Go and relate to John what you have
heard and seen: The blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are made clean, the
deaf hear, the dead rise again," (Luke 7:20,22)
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"Believe you not that I am in the Father, and the Father in me? Otherwise
believe for the very works' sake. Amen, amen I say to you, he that believeth
in me, the works that I do, he also shall do; and greater than these shall
he do" (John 14:11,12)
miracles, for that they had not done penance. Woe to thee, Corozain, woe
to thee, Bethsaida: for if in Tire and Sidon had been wrought the miracles
that have been wrought in you, they had long ago done penance in sackcloth
and ashes... And thou Capharnaum, shalt thou be exalted up to heaven? Thou
shalt go down even to hell. For if in Sodom had been wrought the miracles
that have been wrought in thee, perhaps it had remained unto this day."
(Matt. 11:20,21, 23)
raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out devils: freely have you
received, freely give" (Matt. 10:7,8)
out devils: they shall speak with new tongues. They shall take up serpents;
and if they shall drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them: they shall
lay their hands upon the sick, and they shall recover... But they going
forth preached everywhere: the Lord working withal, and confirming the word
with signs that followed." (Mark 16:18,20)
(Jesus then cured his son) "Jesus said to him, Thy son liveth; and himself
believed, and his whole house." - (John 4:48,53)
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Although miracles can very effectively lead one to have faith, we must remember that it is more pleasing to God if ones comes to believe without these physical proofs. To repeat, Our Lord tells us, "blessed are they that have not seen, and have believed." - (John 20:29) This is the ideal.
It is to be especially noted here (and very important in apologetics), as we see in the above quotes, that Our Lord intended this proof of miracles to remain in the Catholic Church as a continuous testimony and proof of where the true religion and true believers are. The promise of miracles was given to the true believers, meaning that miracles will be a characteristic of the group of true believers, not that miracles would be promised to each individual believer. We must remember that these miracles would be performed BY CHRIST through the agency of the believer.
Since this is the word of the Lord - a promise and a prophecy - all true Christians must recognize and admit that this promise has been repeatedly FULFILLED throughout history. It is not enough simply "to accept the Lord as one's Personal Savior". One must recognize that this amazing promise of Our Lord has resulted in many miracles of the very likes which have been promised by Him. They have all been directly associated only with the Catholic Church. When we look into the promise to "raise the dead" we will find that many Saints have done so, such as, St. Patrick, St. Vincent Ferrer, St. Colette, etc. And all of these Saints were Catholics adhering to the primacy of the Bishop of Rome. This will not be found outside of Catholicism. In relatively recent years, during the 20th century, there are documented cases of instantaneous cures, such as, the cure of a broken leg: a man suffering for months from a leg completely broken and dangling such that his foot was facing backwards, one day goes to the spring at Lourdes, France and the next day is walking on a completed set leg (where the fracture still shows in the x-ray, and a missing piece of bone is now no longer missing). The scientists recognize the miracle, but we do not hear about it because they do not want to promote something that has such an obvious and necessary conclusion attached to it.
This promise (and prophecy) that -miracles will only be associated with Christ's True Church- is true in regard to the character, consistency and frequency of the miracles as promised by Our Lord in scripture. St. Francis de Sales used this as a basic argument in his work to help convert the 72,000 Calvinist Protestants in southern France around the turn of the 18th century.
There has been, and will always be, those who make the objection that they know of this or that obscure miracle that was claimed to be experienced by a non-catholic. St. Francis also addresses this by saying that, very infrequently God performs a miracle, even for a pagan, in order to give testimony to a particular "natural virtue", but this never fits the character, consistency and frequency of the promise of miracles that gives testimony as to WHERE to find the Truth. Since the Lord intends all men on earth to worship Him in the Catholic Church, he invisibly leads all men towards that Church by actual graces which very infrequently can take the form of an actual miracle, though rarely, if ever, one that can be considered first class. Outside of Catholicism it is almost impossible to discern one of these considering the fact that the "lying wonders" of the devil are so prevalent outside of the Fold of Christ.
Even in the 20th century, besides the miracles at Lourdes, we see such splendid examples of miracles. In the Guinness Book of World Records we can even read of Theresa Neuman who had lived on the Holy Eucharist for 30 years...and stayed plump looking all her life! Or, of the miracle at Fatima, Portugal in 1917 where three Catholic shepherd children, based on what they said an apparition told them, predicted to the very day and hour, months beforehand, a miracle that was witnessed by over 70,000 people, among whom where many unbelievers. This only scratches the surface.
These miracles prove just what Our Lord promised them to prove - "these signs shall follow them that believe." in order to show all men WHERE they can find the Way, the Truth and the Life. This is in perfect accord with what the Catholic Church has always taught. Pope Pius XI speaks precisely on this in his 1929 encyclical on Fostering True Christian Unity, "Mortalium Animos". The very definition of "religion" is the "true and proper worship of our Creator". And Pope Pius XI repeats: "The Catholic Church is alone in keeping the true worship."
sensible effects. Wherefore... he is brought to a certain degree of
supernatural knowledge of the objects of faith by certain supernatural
effects which are called miracles"
- St. Thomas Aquinas [Summa II-II, clxxviii, 1]
never be known with certainty, or that by them the divine origin of the
Christian religion cannot be rightly proved, let him be anathema"
- Vatican Council (1870) [Sess.3, Can. 3,4]
