[From THE MIRACLE DETECTIVE by Randall Sullivan, contributing editor to Rolling Stone]

....a team of physicians from the University of Montpelier ... were about to conduct the most complete scientific study of an alleged supernatural event in the history of Catholicism. The leader of the French doctors ... Dr. Henri Joyeux had come to Medjugorje on his first trip to the village accompanied by only an electronics engineer. The two men had made video- and audio tapes of the visionaries during thirty-five apparitions, hoping to determine whether the "synchronizations" of the seers might have been orchestrated. Back in France, after several weeks of studying the tapes at the slowest speeds possible, Dr. Joyeux became convinced that "definitive" tests were warranted and organized a team of other doctors from the university. He could not, of course, prove that these six children were actually seeing the Virgin Mary, Dr. Joyeux told Father Laurentin. However, the doctor felt certain that he would be able to confirm or eliminate an entire range of medical and psychological explanations.

The problem was that the seers refused to cooperate, citing the Virgin's statement to Ivan during the tests by the Italian doctors nearly a year earlier: "It is not necessary." Only after days' delay and a series of strenuous arguments were Dr. Joyeux and Father Laurentin able to convince young Jakov that the children should ask the Virgin for permission to be tested during their next apparition. This they had done, the six reported that evening, and the Madonna's reply was succinct: "You are free." After another day of discussion, all six visionaries agreed to be tested.

The most eminent of the physicians on Dr. Joyeux's team was the ear, nose, and throat specialist Dr. Francois Rouquerol. He had been able to demonstrate a clear "disconnection of the auditory pathways during the ecstasy" of each visionary, Dr. Rouquerol reported. He had proven that most convincingly, the doctor explained, by blaring ninety decibels of engine noise into the ears of the seers during their apparitions; none had reacted. He also reported that, while his instruments showed the visionaries' voices had become completely silent during the apparitions, their lips, tongues, and facial muscles had continued to function exactly as when speech was audible. Somehow, completely separate from the rest of their physical faculties, the larynx of each seer had ceased to operate during the period of silence. This anomaly was singular in his experience and could not be accounted for by any condition known to medical science, Dr. Roquerol concluded.

The opthalmologist on the French team, Dr. Jacques Philippot, not only confirmed the profoundly inhibited eyelid reflex to dazzling light observed earlier by the Italian doctors, but also demonstrated that from the beginning to the end of their apparitions, the gaze of all the children remained fixed on exactly the same point several feet above their heads. Even when he tried to block their vision with an opaque screen, Philippot noted, the seers' eyes had not reacted. What Philippot considered most compelling was that he had measured a simultaneity of eyeball movement among the visionaries of less than one-fifth of a second at both the beginning and the end of their apparitions; this was so far beyond the capacity of normal human functioning that no form of collusion or manipulation could account for it.

Heart specialist Dr. Bernard Hoarau reported that his electrocardiogram, blood pressure, and heart rhythm examinations of the seers during their ecstasies "allow us to exclude totally the existence of the phenomena of dreams, sleep or epilepsy." Neurologist Dr. Jean Cadhilac added that the tests he had conducted on the visionaries "eliminate formally all clinical signs comparable to those observed during individual or collective hallucination, hysteria, neurosis or pathological ecstasy."

Like nearly everyone else who studied the results obtained by the French team, Dr. Joyeux was most impressed by the electroencephalogram tests that had measured activity in eight distinct areas of the seers' brains during their ecstasies. All states of consciousness known to neuroscience involved some admixture of alpha (receptive) and beta (reactive) impulses. Dr. Joyeux observed that the ratio of activity in the seers' brains prior to an apparition was exactly normal: ten alpha cycles to twenty beta cycles each second. Falling asleep or into a trance state would have increased the beta cycles while reducing the number of alpha cycles. During their apparitions, exactly the opposite occurred: Their beta impulses stopped completely. The six young people were not simply awake during their apparitions, but hyper-awake, in a state of pure meditation that previously had been observed in just a handful of Trappist or Buddhist monks while deeply in prayer. And those monks had achieved this "generalized alpha rhythm," Dr. Joyeux noted, only when their eyes were closed, whereas the Medjugorje visionaries had kept their eyes wide open during the entire time of their apparitions.

In the spring of 1985, Dr. Joyeux submitted a report that concluded: "The ecstasies are not pathological, nor is there any element of deceit. No scientific discipline seems able to describe these phenomena." Concurrent with the publication of his work, Dr. Joyeux agreed to an interview with Paris Match. "The phenomena of the apparitions at Medjugorje cannot be explained scientifically," the doctor told the magazine's interviewer. "In one word, these young people are healthy and there is no sign of epilepsy, nor is it a sleep or dream state. It is neither a case of pathological hallucination nor hallucination in the hearing or sight faculies ... It cannot be a cataleptic state, for during the ecstasy the facial muscles are operating in a normal way." The ecstasies of the seers at Medjugorje "do not belong to any scientific determinations," the doctor added. "It is more like a state of deep, active prayer, in which they are partially disconnected from the physical world, in a state of contemplation and sane encounter with a person whom they alone can see, hear and touch. We cannot reach the transmitter, but we can ascertain that the receivers are in a state of sane and good working order."

In September 1985, shortly after Dr. Joyeux left Medjugorje for the last time, the Italians dispatched their own all-star team of doctors from Milan's mangiagalli Clinic to the village. The most intriguing results obtained by the Italian team were reported by Dr. Michael Sabatini, a psychopharmocologist fresh from the faculty of Columbia University, where he had spent years studying "the problem of pain." At Columbia, Dr. Sabatini had developed an instrument he called the algometer, designed to measure the intensity of pain created by applying pressure to particularly sensitive areas of the body. He had used his algometer on each of the Medjugorje seers, and the results showed that the six entered a state of "complete analgesis" during their ecstasies; that is, they were unable to feel pain. This proved beyond any doubt, Dr. Sabatini wrote, that the seers "do not fake and do not deceive." The doctor who supervised the Mangiagalli Clinic team, Dr. Luigi Frigerio, stated that the results obtained by Dr. Sabatini and the neurological tests that demonstrated the seers were not simply awake but hyper-awake during their ecstasies had created a contradiction that "cannot be explained naturally, and thus can be only preternatural or supernatural."

Over the next several years, this claim would be tested by fresh teams of Italian, Polish, Austrian, English, and American scientists, but for many Catholics, Medjugorje already had been validated. While it was correct to report that the state of consciousness observed in the children during their apparitions existed outside any scientific category, Rene Laurentin would write, "the best explanation is that the visionaries are in living, personal, normal contact with a person from another world."...

....[Bishop Zanic] stepped up his media campaign against Medjugorje: "What is behind all this are charismatics and Pentecostals," he told a German reporter, "and above all a large group of fanatical Franciscans who wish to justify their disobedience to their bishop and to Rome."...

....The physician who spoke to me most personally, however, was Dr. Marco Margnelli, a neurophysiologist who came to Yugoslavia during the summer of 1988 convinced that previous charts of the seers' brain functions during their visions had been faulty. A specialist in altered states of consciousness and an avowed atheist, Dr. Margnelli arrived in Medjugorje, he admitted, looking for "any evidence that would contradict it or expose it as a fake." The doctor conducted an array of medical tests on the visionaries, but seemed almost uninterested in the results by the time he returned home and granted an interview in which he described the seers' visions as "a genuine state of ecstasy."

"As a scientist, I can only declare that the children really pass into another state of consciousness -- a condition that one can also reach through meditation techniques, such as auto-training, though not as profoundly," Dr. Margnelli explained. He would not presume to describe this state the seers entered, "but we were certainly in the presence of an extraordinary phenomenon. Whether we are dealing with an authentic apparition or something else we cannot explain and I cannot say. It is a question I prefer not to put to myself."

Only a moment later, though, Margnelli added a statement that would startle his colleagues: "Since returning from Yugoslavia, I have been thinking about it continually and I confess, I also ask myself NONSCIENTIFIC questions, such as what the meaning of the whole thing can be." Dr. Margnelli then described a series of events to which he had been witness, from the "synchronous movements" of the visionaries to the apparently miraculous healing of a woman with leukemia. What had affected him most deeply were the birds: during the late afternoon, they would gather in the trees outside the rectory where the seers shared their apparitions, chirping and cooing and calling by the hundreds, at times deafeningly loud, until "they suddenly and simultaneously all go silent as soon as the apparition begins. This "absolute silence of the birds" haunted him, the doctor admitted.

A few months after returning to Milan, Dr. Margnelli became a practicing Catholic.

http://walterkarp.tripod.com/weareentitledtomiracles

Interesting. It sounds like "common sense" is your religion. That's cool. It certainly is preferable to myths and dogma, in my opinion. If we could elevate "common sense" (and the "common good") to the level of public policy it would solve a lot of our problems.

By the way, spiritually-minded people reject false religion, just like true science will (soon, hopefully) reject lies masquerading as science, as you point out.