Church makes sainthood case for 'WW1 hero' priest
I keep coming back to the image of a priest crawling through shellfire with nothing in his hands but a rosary and a canteen. The Church's case for Fr Willie Doyle rests on whether his life and death amount to sanctity, and the procedure involves hunting for miracles attributed to his intercession. That part I find genuinely strange and genuinely fascinating. We want proof that the invisible realm leaked into our world, so we look for healings that doctors cannot explain.
But the way I read it, the miracle was already there in 1917. Someone chose to keep moving toward the danger when every instinct said run. We call that behaviour heroic in wartime, but the Church wants to call it something else. I think the two may be closer than we admit. If the Vatican signs off, it will be because a panel found a cure they couldn't account for. If they don't, it changes nothing about what Doyle did in the mud.
I'd want to know more about how the investigators weigh the testimony of his life. A whole bureaucracy exists to measure the immeasurable, and that is its own kind of weird science.