Mary MacKillop's miracles
The Vatican accepted the 1961 recovery of Veronica Hopson from acute leukaemia, after prayers to Mary MacKillop, as a miracle; a second cure in the 1990s led to MacKillop's canonisation in 2010 as Australia's first saint.
1961 CE · -33.84, 151.21 · status: official
The account
MacKillop (1842–1909) co-founded the Sisters of St Joseph and was briefly excommunicated in 1871. Her tomb in North Sydney is a pilgrimage site.
The sceptical view
Leukaemia sometimes remits with treatment; the Church's medical board judges such cases 'inexplicable' but outside doctors may disagree.
The researched reading
Two real and remarkable recoveries. Rare remissions and the way miracle causes select their cases account for most of the weight, and a modest share stays open.
| Explanation | Weight | Why |
|---|---|---|
| A known natural phenomenon | 40% | Acute leukaemia in a young adult was often fatal in 1961, but remissions under hospital treatment did happen, and some lasted. One durable recovery is unusual, but medicine has seen it before. Kathleen Evans’s later cure of lung and secondary brain cancer is the stronger of the two cases, yet spontaneous regression of advanced cancer is documented too. |
| Undetermined | 22% | The share a generic explanation had beyond what has been shown for this case: it fits many cases like this one, but has not been demonstrated for this one. |
| A cultural story | 18% | Canonisation needs approved miracles, so causes look for striking recoveries among the many people who prayed. The rare survivors are selected and the unanswered prayers are never counted. |
| Genuinely anomalous | 14% | Two well-documented recoveries from diseases with grim prognoses are what remain once ordinary explanations are applied. The Vatican board was satisfied, but no outside panel has published a review of the records. |
| Perception, memory or mind | 4% | Hope and morale can help people get through treatment, but they do not cure leukaemia. |
| A hoax or fabrication | 2% | The medical files were reviewed by the Vatican’s board, and nothing suggests the illness or the recovery was faked. |
Official position: The Vatican’s medical board and the Congregation for the Causes of Saints judged both cures medically inexplicable and recognised them as miracles (1961 cure endorsed 1992; Evans cure decreed 2009).