The Roman Catholic shrine at Lourdes may introduce a "miracle lite" category for sudden unexplained recoveries because modern medicine increasingly refuses to declare any disease incurable. Every year, dozens of seriously ill people leave the town in southwestern France convinced they have been cured, but the Church does not rate their cases as miracles because its rules say doctors must attest their ailments could not be remedied.Jacques Perrier, Bishop of Tarbes and Lourdes, said the Vatican need not change the rules for declaring miracles, but could create a new category of "authentic healings" so those who recover can share the story of their physical and spiritual experiences with others.The Church teaches God sometimes performs miracles, including cures doctors cannot explain. Skeptics reject this as unscientific and explain sudden recoveries as psychological phenomena or the delayed result of treatment.Unlike in the past, the Bishop said, doctors are now reluctant to say a disease is incurable -- one of the strict requirements laid down in the 1700s for recognizing miracles. Uncertainty is a key element in modern thinking, he noted."Doctors today speak in statistical terms, saying, for example, that the chances of recovery are very slim," he said. "They have a very hard time saying a disease is completely incurable."Most healings may fail to meet this or that criterion for a miracle," he added."We want to get recognition for a category of authentic healings linked to Lourdes."Bishop Perrier said he was working on a proposal for the new category of Lourdes healings to put to the Vatican for approval.

He insisted Catholicism's leading miracle shrine was not considering the change in order to boost pilgrimages to the grotto where the Virgin Mary is said to have appeared to a peasant girl in 1858. "There's been no decline in visits," he said.Rather, it sensed a lost opportunity since those said to be cured during a Lourdes visit but not declared miracle cases do not get Church approval to share their story in public -- at retreats or meetings with other Catholics.Six million people flock annually to the town in the Pyrenees. About 7,000 have claimed to have been cured since the shrine's medical bureau began keeping records in 1883, but only 66 have been declared miraculously healed.Bishop Perrier says a shrine committee examines possible miracle cases and rejects most of them. The last official miracle -- a man said to be cured of multiple sclerosis -- was declared in 1999 after 12 years of inquiries.

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