News Excerpt and Photo from the BBC
When Belfast doctor Michael Moran began volunteering in Lourdes 17 years ago, he had no idea that he would end up becoming part of a small, select team that evaluates miracles at the Catholic religious shrine in France.
The small market town lies in the foothills of the Pyrenees, and is famous for the Marian apparitions of Our Lady of Lourdes that are reported to have occurred in 1858 to Bernadette Soubirous.
The trainee ENT surgeon is the first doctor from Ireland to take a place on the panel.
Dr Moran said his appointment came "very much by surprise".
"I'd been volunteering in Lourdes for years and had the normal contact that any doctor would have with the medical bureau there," he said.
Since 1858, there have been 69 verified miracles or cures in Lourdes.
"The most recent one was a lady with extremely high blood pressure who had a benign tumour on her adrenal gland that was secreting adrenaline and keeping her blood pressure very high and she felt suddenly well.
"That's a characteristic, that you suddenly feel something different has happened, she felt it when she was in the bath in Lourdes and that was in the 1980s and that was only just confirmed in 2011."
He said the first cure was of a paralysed arm that regained function suddenly.
"Another classic example of that is a gentleman from Italy who had a tumour of the pelvis and although you can see the destruction of the pelvic bone on x-rays which are available for the public to view in Lourdes, the bone actually re-grew, both in the pelvis and the femur in an anatomically correct way that would be very hard to explain," he said.
Michael said miracles were just the "tip of the iceberg" at Lourdes.
Read More: Dr. Michael Moran
