The vatican x-files

The Catholic Church has always tried to keep a tight grasp on decisions regarding which visions, weeping statues, stigmata, levitations, incorrupt nuns and so on are approved as miracles and declared “de supernaturalitate” (of the supernatural) by the Pope, and which are not. However, the process of discernment by which this is decided typically takes years, and sometimes decades, with only six phenomena being declared officially supernatural since 1950. As a result, there is a major backlog of cases, and this has only got worse in the 21st century as social media has made it possible for news of alleged miracles to travel around the world in minutes. To deal with the problem, the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF), which investigates claims of the supernatural, has issued a new version of its standard operating procedure for handling claims of the miraculous, the Norms for Proceeding in the Discernment of Alleged Supernatural Phenomena. The previous version dated from 1978 (although was only made public in 2011) and had not been revised since. Published on 17 May, these new Norms entirely replace those from 1978 and took effect from 19 May, the date of this year’s Pentecost. The document attempts to both speed up the discernment process and make the outcome clearer. The major change is that discernment will end “not with a declaration of ‘de supernaturalitate’”, but with one of six different “prudential conclusions” instead. Announcing this change, Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, prefect of the DDF, explained that these conclusions “do not include the possibility of declaring that the phenomenon under discernment is of supernatural origin – that is, affirming with moral certainty that it originates from a decision willed by God in a direct way.” This is not only to enable conclusions to be reached more quickly, but also to “avoid any confusion that belief in these phenomena is obligatory”.

The six prudential conclusions show varying degrees of approval and are:

Nihil obstat (Nothing hinders): This is given “Without expressing any certainty about the supernatural authenticity of the phenomenon itself, many signs of the action of the Holy Spirit are acknowledged… and no aspects that are particularly critical or risky have been detected, at