A Book Review… Miracles And Marvels, The Great Works Of The Saints
By DONAL ANTHONY FOLEY
Mysteries, Marvels, and Miracles in the Lives of the Saints by Joan Carroll Cruz (TAN Books, 606 pages, paperback).
Mysteries, Marvels, and Miracles is a hefty paperback work running to over 600 pages, which is full of fascinating accounts of incidents from the lives of the saints, and which is both illuminating and edifying.
It covers various aspects of the miraculous in the lives of those Catholic holy men and women closest to God, ranging from bilocation, through prophecy, the stigmata, and incorruptibility, along with numerous other mysterious supernatural phenomena.
Many saints were gifted with the power of levitation — that is, being raised from the ground, often when they were in an ecstasy of prayer, including St. Philip Neri and St. Ignatius of Loyola. The saint who is most well-known for this phenomena, though, is St. Joseph of Cupertino (d. 1663), a Franciscan.
His ecstatic levitations were so numerous that he is regarded as the patron saint of air travelers. One of his levitations was even witnessed by a reigning Pontiff, Pope Urban VIII.
While some saints have been associated with what is known as the “odor of sanctity,” that is, a beautiful sweet-smelling perfume-like odor coming either from their person, or after their death from their relics, there have also been saints who have been able to detect an “odor of sin,” coming from persons in a state of mortal sin, including St. Paul of the Cross and St. John Bosco.
There have also been saints who were able to travel in a miraculous fashion, including the celebrated wonder worker, St. Francis of Paola (d. 1507). On one occasion he wanted to go by ferry from the Italian mainland to Messina in Sicily, a distance of about four or five miles. He asked the ferry captain to transport him and his companions not for money, but purely for “the love of Christ.”
The captain, however, refused and so the saint knelt down in prayer on the beach, blessed the sea, and then spread out his mantle on the water. Then, using his staff as a mast, he made a sail with one corner of his garment, and to the utter amazement of all those watching, sailed across the sea to Messina. This mantle is still kept as a relic at Paola in Italy.
Other saints had mystical gifts concerned with language and speech. One of these was the Spaniard St. Vincent Ferrer (d. 1419), who had a great mission from God to travel around Europe, preaching quite often to vast crowds. Despite the fact that he could only speak Latin and the language of his native Valencia, he was easily understood by persons from many different nationalities.
On at least one occasion, a certain monk who was unable to go to the place where the saint was preaching, prayed that nonetheless he would hear what was said during the sermon from his monastery, which was many miles away — and was miraculously able to do so.
The gift of tongues was also possessed by St. Anthony of Padua and St. Dominic.
Other saints engaged in mystical fasts, including the Franciscan, St. Peter of Alcantara (d. 1652), who was renowned for the extreme austerity of his life. It was quite common for him to eat only once every three days and sometimes he went a week without food. He only slept an hour and a half each night, and was probably sustained in part by the Holy Eucharist, which has also been the case with other saints.
Some saints have been well known for the gift of reading souls and hearts, including St. Philip Neri (d. 1595), who frequently exercised this gift in the confessional, and was able to tell penitents their sins and secret thoughts.
One of the most well-known signs of sanctity, though, has been the state of incorruptibility of the bodies of numerous saints after death — and sometimes even centuries later. A sweet odor emanating from the tomb of St. Mary Magdalen dei Pazzi (d. 1607), a year after her death, led to her body being exhumed. When the casket was opened, “the corpse was found to be still entire, fresh-looking and flesh-like in its softness. Blond hairs still adhered to the head: The whole body was flexible.”
Two and a half months after St. Francis Xavier’s death off China in 1552, his casket was raised and his body was found to be perfectly preserved. It was then transferred to Malacca for five months before being taken to Goa in India. His incorrupt body was then exposed for four days in the Basilica of Bom Jesus. A year and half after his death, it was examined and no trace of embalming or any use of preservative agents was found.
In 1694, the body was again exhumed, nearly a century and a half after the death of the saint, and again found to be incorrupt, and with a very lifelike appearance and hair still black. One of the witnesses to this exhumation, a Protestant commissary of the Dutch East India Company, was converted by the experience.
St. Anthony And The Fish
Regarding animals, there are numerous accounts of mysterious happenings. The Dominican St. Martin de Porres (d. 1639) is well-known for his love of animals, but on one occasion, when his friary was overrun with rats and mice he was ordered to purchase some poison and use it to get rid of them. Instead, he offered to feed the animals outside, and went to the hole where they gained entry to the house.
Here he found a small gray mouse and admonished it to tell its fellow rodents not to do any more mischief indoors but to leave the building and he would feed them outside. The mouse listened to the saint, and disappeared into the hole. A few moments later there was a great scuttling sound and the other friars watched in amazement as a large number of rats and mice exited the house and from then on were fed by St. Martin.
A particularly famous incident with animals involved St. Anthony of Padua (d. 1231), who on one occasion, when he was at Rimini on the east coast of Italy, began to preach to the “heretics and infidels” in the town. But they refused to listen to him, and so the saint went to the bank of a river near the sea and cried out to the fish that they should come to hear the Word of God.
In response a great number of fish of all shapes and sizes assembled before St. Anthony, holding their heads up out of the water and facing him. He began to preach to them, and as he did so news of the miracle spread and the people of the town hastened to see it for themselves. When he had finished his sermon, the saint dismissed the fish with the blessing of God, and the result was a great number of conversions in Rimini.
The above incidents are only a small sample of the many hundreds contained in Mysteries, Marvels and Miracles in the Lives of the Saints, which is a well-documented and engaging work — and indeed such awe-inspiring miracles are one of the hallmarks of the Church, and a guarantee and reassurance for believers of the truth of its claims.
No other religious body has such a wealth of examples of sanctity stretching back nearly two thousand years now, as a living confirmation of Christ’s words, that “Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do, because I go to the Father” (John 14:12).
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(Donal Anthony Foley is the author of a number of books on Marian Apparitions, and maintains a related website at www.theotokos.org.uk. He has also written two time-travel/adventure books for young people, and the third in the series is due to be published next year — details can be seen at: http://glaston-chronicles.co.uk.)
