Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD
them and reciting a Pater Noster and an Ave Maria . . . [A]s
soon as we made the sign of the cross over them, all those for
whom we prayed told the others that they were well and
healthy . . .
Soon they were curing cripples. Cabeza de Vaca reports he raised
a man from the dead. After that,
we were very much hampered by the large number of people
who were following us . . . their eagerness to come and touch
us was very great and their importunity so extreme that three
hours would pass without our being able to persuade them to
leave us alone.
When a tribe begged the Spaniards not to leave them, Cabeza de
Vaca and his companions became angry. Then,
a strange thing happened . . . [M]any of them fell ill, and
eight men died the next day. All over the land, in the places
where this became known, they were so afraid of us that it
seemed that the very sight of us made them almost die of fear.
They implored us not to be angry, nor to wish for any more
of them to die; and they were altogether convinced that we
killed them simply by wishing to.
In 1858, an apparition of the Virgin Mary was reported in
Lourdes, France; the Mother of God confirmed the dogma of her
immaculate conception which had been proclaimed by Pope Pius
IX just four years earlier. Something like a hundred million
people have come to Lourdes since then in the hope of being
cured, many with illnesses that the medicine of the time was
helpless to defeat. The Roman Catholic Church rejected the
authenticity of large numbers of claimed miraculous cures, accepting
only sixty-five in nearly a century and a half (of tumours,
tuberculosis, opthalmitis, impetigo, bronchitis, paralysis and
other diseases, but not, say, the regeneration of a limb or a
severed spinal cord). Of the sixty-five, women outnumber men
ten to one. The odds of a miraculous cure at Lourdes, then, are
220