Very Dubious Miracles

“I had my doubts, from the moment I read the headline, ‘The evangelicals who believe they can raise the dead’,” begins my latest column for Aleteia, Raising the Dead? In it I try to explain why Catholics who believe in the miraculous react to some group’s claims to miraculous powers by rolling our eyes or backing slowly towards the door.

The thirty-one-year-old head of the Dead Raising Team claims to have raised thirteen people himself, though when questioned by the Daily Telegraph’s reporter proves very hazy on the details. “I’m so bad with dates,” he says. The story featured in their Kickstarter-funded movie Dead Raisers, of a man rescued from Hell by the prayers of a deadraiser dressed like Jesus and speaking in tongues, seems to have been made up. The man himself tells the reporter to note how the film is edited.

Almost all the serious Christians I know react like this to stories like this one. Our eyebrows go up and often our eyes roll. Catholics believe in miracles and to an extent that would seem nuts to the average American if he really knew what his Catholic friends believed.

. . . But with the Dead Raising Team’s kind of miracle, eyebrows go up, as they do, and perhaps for the same reason, when we hear a prosperity gospel preacher, even though some of them are surely sincere. The reason, I think, has to do with our and their very different attitudes to the miraculous.

Then follows a description of the hyper-supernaturalists. The column can be found here.