The Miracle of All Miracles in Calanda Miguel Juan Pellicer, a young farmer from Calanda in Aragon, fell from a mule-drawn cart in July 1637 near Castellon, fracturing his right tibia under the wheel. After treatment at hospitals in Valencia and Zaragoza, the gangrenous leg was amputated four fingers below the knee in mid-October 1637 on the decision of the surgeon Juan de Estanga, with Diego Millaruelo, master of surgery, assisting at the operation. The severed limb was buried in the hospital cemetery. Fitted with a wooden leg, Pellicer spent roughly two years begging near the Basilica of Our Lady of the Pillar in Zaragoza, attending daily Mass and anointing his stump with oil from the votive lamps before the Virgin's statue. He returned home to Calanda in mid-March 1640. On the night of March 29, his mother entered his room and found two legs beneath his blanket. The amputated right leg had been restored. On Palm Sunday, April 1, Don Marco Seguer, parish priest of Mazaleon, accompanied by the royal notary Miguel Andreu, recorded the sworn testimony of ten persons. No modern scientific investigation has been conducted, but the 1640-1641 canonical process produced detailed medical testimony under oath. Juan de Estanga, professor of surgery at the University of Zaragoza, deposed that the leg had been cut off with the help of his practitioners and nurses, and that the limb shown to him at the hearing was, he believed and held for certain, the same one. Diego Millaruelo, master of surgery at the hospital, deposed that he was present at the amputation and helped carry it out. Juan Lorenzo Garcia, the assistant who buried the severed limb, also testified. A news-sheet of the period, the Aviso Historico, dated June 4, 1640 — the day before the canonical process opened — reported that searches in the hospital cemetery at Zaragoza found no trace of the buried leg, only the empty hole. The surviving process records no exhumation of its own. The restored leg initially appeared cold, hard, and bluish, with contracted toes. Pellicer could not bear weight on it at first, but within days the leg regained strength and the toes extended. It was initially several centimeters shorter than the other leg but reportedly reached its original length within three months. Pre-existing marks were recognized on the restored limb: a dog-bite scar on the calf, a scar at the ankle left by the removal of a cyst, and scratches left by thorns. In 1999 Landino Cugola, a limb-replantation specialist in the hand surgery unit of the Verona Polyclinic, reviewed the sworn testimonies and reported that the clinical course they describe parallels what is observed after modern limb replantation, adding that the limb regained its length without the external fixation normally needed to lengthen bone. The Archbishop of Zaragoza opened a formal canonical inquiry on June 5, 1640, two months after the event. Over the course of nearly a year, twenty-four witnesses testified in public hearings, including the surgeons, hospital staff, family members, and townspeople, with no dissenting testimony appearing in the surviving record. On April 27, 1641, Archbishop Pedro Apaolaza Ramirez pronounced judgment declaring that Pellicer's right leg had been miraculously restored, that the restoration was not the work of nature, and that it was to be judged and held a miracle because all the conditions belonging to the essence of a true miracle were present. In the autumn of that year Pellicer was received at the royal court in Madrid, where accounts of the audience report that King Philip IV kissed the restored leg. The miracle has not received formal Vatican-level recognition; it remains an archdiocesan declaration. The original notarized statement by Miguel Andreu, dated April 2, 1640, is preserved in a glass case at Zaragoza's town hall. A certified copy of the canonical proceedings is held in the archives of the Cathedral of the Pillar. The original manuscript of the proceedings, kept in the archives of the Pillar chapter house, was handed about 1930 to a Benedictine monk who took it to France; he was killed in the Second World War and the manuscript has been unaccounted for since. One of two certified copies, kept in the Zaragoza town archives, burned in 1808 during the Napoleonic wars. A printed notarized edition was published in 1829 and remains available. The Casa-Museo Miguel Pellicer in Calanda commemorates the event, and a sculpted image of Pellicer's leg is displayed in an arch of the town's Templo del Pilar. https://www.miracolieucaristici.org/en/download/calanda.pdf
As I read it, almost three years passed before his leg miraculously rejoined him. Approximate to the length of Our Lord’s ministry on Earth was the first thought that struck me when I realised the timescale.
I think miracles in general and this miracle in particular were an important factor in former agnostic apologist Joe Schmidt's conversion to Christianity and Catholicism. Interestingly, Joe says that there were many different powerful objections to Theism. However, he was swayed by a probabilistic reasoning: there were also many powerful rational reasons in favour of Theism. When he estimated the overall probability of the 'logical disjunction' of all of these arguments, they outweighed the disjunction of the objections favouring atheism. In the field of statistics and probability, the way this works is that any proposition concerning the way the world is or works is called 'an event'. There may be multiple different and conflicting propositions. For example: the world is like A or B or C or D etc. 'A or B or C or D' is a logical disjunction. These events are said to divide or carve up the event space. The probability of the disjunction 'A or B or C or D' is calculated by summing the probability of the individual events, i.e. pr(A) + pr(B) + pr(C) + pr(D) - provided the events are independent of each other. Each of these events may be in turn be divided up or composed of sub-events. So the case for Theism might for example be carved up by 'A or B', while the case for Atheism might be carved up by 'C or D'. The total probability of 'A or B or C or D' is by definition 100%. So what Joe Schmidt is saying is that when he looked at the sum of the probabilities for Theism it outweighed those for Atheism. By this kind of reasoning he reasoned his way from atheism/agnosticism to theism to Christianity to Catholicism. This reminds me of Pascal's reasoned and mathematical approach to faith in God. This might not be everyone's 'cup of tea' but for the times we live in and for those who have a more materialistic, scientific or numerate mindset, I think it is an important tool in the armoury of the Holy Spirit. But blessed are those who have not seen and yet believed.
