Love - The Greatest Miracle

by Piersandro Vanzan, SI

Outstanding missionary and first bishop of Central Africa, St Daniel Comboni was canonized by Pope John Paul II in St Peter’s Square, Rome, on October 5, 2003. The miracle performed through his intercession is a striking testament to the man he was.

The person cured was the 36-year-old Sudanese Muslim woman, Lubna Abdel Aziz, who had already given birth to four children, all by cesarean section. This was the fifth time that she had chosen to have her child at the Khartoum St Mary’s Maternity Hospital, run by the Comboni Missionary Sisters.

Only a miracle will do

Her fifth cesarean operation was scheduled for 7.30am on November 11, 1997. Once the baby had been taken from her womb, the surgeon noticed that the mother was hemorrhaging; he decided to close the wound, in the hope that the bleeding would stop in the natural way.

At 12 noon, however, it was so serious that Lubna needed a blood transfusion, after which she was taken back to the operating theater where her uterus was removed. She was then placed in intensive care, but her blood pressure continued to fall precipitously, with her pulse becoming imperceptible. The Sisters begin to pray, realizing that now only a miracle could save her.

In the afternoon the clinical situation deteriorated further: the wound was bleeding copiously and the blood refusing to coagulate. Lubna was taken back once again to the operating room, where four surgeons took part in a third operation, but by now Lubna, was in a state of collapse, and at the end of the operation there was the further complication of a pulmonary edema. The following day, November 13, however, Lubna was fully conscious with all her vital signs normal; she left hospital on November 18.

Beyond scientific explanations

The first thing a non-medical person might be tempted to think is that Lubna was saved by the third operation. The medical reports stress, however, that it had not been possible adequately to treat the hemorrhage after the second operation, given the lack of fresh blood and plasma. In fact, all the available statistics indicate that a woman in Lubna’s condition cannot be expected to survive. Indeed, during the third operation the anesthetist all but gave up the struggle because of the complications which had arisen.

Yet even more inexplicable is the speed with which Lubna’s clinical situation improved after the third operation. For a woman who had been in such poor condition to be well again after forty-eight hours is something that medical science cannot explain.

We thus come to the most delicate, but also perhaps most interesting, point: how can we read this event in the light of faith? This is a very special and unusual kind of miracle, and we need to examine why this is so.

First of all, there is the fact that the miracle was so unspectacular. Anyone who is not a doctor finds it difficult to understand what was so special about what happened. When, instead, someone’s leg grows back into place, or a cancer disappears almost instantaneously, everyone can see that these things are not owed to the work of the doctors.

The second unusual element here is the role played by the doctors: either because of a lack of the required expertise, or because of the conditions under which they had to work, instead of facilitating the healing process, they in fact accelerated the approach of death. It is no chance that the report on the miracle underlines the inadequacy of the methods of surgery and transfusion used in Lubna’s case.

The work of God?

But in what way might we say that what happened was God’s work? We might be tempted to reach for a “consoling” explanation: we know that human beings make mistakes, but fortunately in the end God puts things right. Of course, there is some truth in this, but is that all there is? Or do we have, instead, a more powerful and fascinating message? We might indeed well imagine that God used this miracle to focus the attention of the rich nations of the North on Africa’s endemic and tragic poverty (including in the medical field), and to encourage them to exercise a truer solidarity.

But let us come to the way in which this miracle is so typical of St Daniel Comboni. First of all, it happened in Africa, and at the very heart of what was Comboni’s mission, the Sudan. And then there is the person who was cured: a woman, and not a Catholic, but a Muslim. Especially nowadays, with all the anti-Western and anti-Christian feeling rife among Muslims, this aspect is very meaningful indeed:  the Christian God does not wait for Muslims to be converted to bless them with a miracle - because he loves them as they are. And Christians do good for Muslims not if and when they convert to the Gospel, but simply because they are their brothers and sisters: all children of the One Creator and Father.

Prayer in solidarity

Lubna understood this: this was the fifth time she had chosen to be treated in the Catholic hospital. If she had not been happy with the way she had been treated on the previous occasions, she would have chosen differently; instead she returned.

Finally, we should notice how in the prayer of intercession for Lubna, everyone was involved, not only the Sisters. The doctors prayed, and Lubna’s mother prayed, even though they are not Christians. What Lubna’s mother knew was that Comboni had loved Africa, that he had loved the Sudan, and that he had loved the sick he encountered there and whom he tried to treat as well as he might. She understood that Comboni had not sent the Sisters to Khartoum for her daughter to die, but rather that she should live. She understood that the idea of praying to Comboni was reasonable and opportune, and so she prayed too.

Faced with the power of such a prayer raised in such solidarity, God paid attention. He could not have done otherwise, because he does not hope for anything other from us: that we become brothers and sisters in love, in hope and in faith. Indeed, it is this which is the greatest of all miracles, the real miracle for which our third millennium waits. St Daniel Comboni tells us that this miracle is possible.

Loving to the end

However, fully to understand the nature and power of this miracle, we need to bear in the mind the long history of injustice to which Christians have been subjected in Muslim Africa.

This is not the place to draw up a list of the wrongs suffered; but it is not the same thing when Christians help people who respect them, and when they love those who steal from them and kill them. Unfortunately, we Christians are far from sufficiently aware of how much Christian blood has been shed in the 20^th century, and the wider world is even less aware of this. Yet, if we Christians used the wrongs received to accuse others, or to respond to injustice with “commensurate” hostility, we would not be following the Gospel.

Instead, it is precisely because of the wounds of the Risen One – and the wounds, too, inflicted on his Mystical Body – that we have to consider the link between blood and love. In Lubna’s miracle, everything hangs on blood. She is a mother, because she gives her blood, and she does not give it because her child will be good, but because her child is her child. The Church, too, would matter little if she only gave the Divine Blood in a purely ritual way; but she is, instead, a spouse and mother, because, like Lubna, she gives the last drop of her blood in a ceaseless bringing to birth of new children. And, after bringing these new children to birth, she gives too the milk of service and of affection, and – with the help of the Communion of Saints – the milk of miracle.

St Daniel Comboni gave his life for Africa: but he is more than ever alive now, and continues to go to the aid of the continent he loved so much. Now he desires that those who follow him, and the whole Church, should do the same.

Copyright©2003, 2004 World Mission Magazine