Augustine Pamplany CST
Alexis Carell (1873-1944) was a French biologist and surgeon. He won the Nobel Prize in Physiology in 1912. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for his pioneering works in vascular suturing methods. His discovery of the perfusion pump in a way opened the way to organ transplantation.
His journey of faith had been very eventful. Though brought up as a catholic child, he had lost his faith after his schooldays and became an agnostic. His agnosticism was challenged by his own personal witness of a miracle in Lourdes. At the request of a friend, he was helping out some patients who were transported form Lyons to Lourdes in 1912. Among them were Mary Bailly who was suffering from severe tuberculosis and DrCarell predicted that she would die even before she reached Lourdes. However, when the Holy water was poured over her in Lourdes, she recovered quite fast and returned to Lyons the next day quite healthy.
Of her healing Carell Wrote: “The enormously distended and very hard abdomen began to flatten and within 30 minutes it had completely disappeared. No discharge whatsoever was observed from the body.” Carell was still reluctant to testify it as a miracle as he was scared of losing his job at the medical faculty of Lyons. However when Mary Bailly’s healing drew a lot public attention, he replied that the medical community had unjustifiably refused to look at the facts that made it a miracle.
This caused him his career at Lyons which in a way was a blessing in disguise for him. He moved to the United States which finally led to his Nobel Prize winning findings.
He had a strong faith in a personal God who answered our prayer. Of Jesus, he said, “Jesus knows our world. He does not disdain us like the God of Aristotle. We can speak to Him and He answers us. Although He is a person like ourselves, He is God and transcends all things.” “We are loved by an immaterial and all-powerful Being. This Being is accessible to our prayers. We must love Him above all creatures. And we ourselves must also love one another.”
His own personal story led him to emphasise the importance of providing religious training to Children: “It is, of course, a waste of time to talk to children of theology and duty. But we should follow Kant’s advice and present God to them very early indeed as an invisible father who watches over them and to whom they can address prayers.”
Perhaps his personal encounter with miracle led him to this assertion: “It is sheer pride to believe oneself capable of correcting nature, for nature is the work of God.”
He believed that being religious is very helpful for being moral: “Christian morality is incomparably more powerful than lay morality. Thus man will never enthusiastically obey the laws of rational conduct unless he considers the laws of life as the command of a personal God.” “Christianity offers men the very highest of moralities. It presents to them a God who can be adored because He is within our reach and Whom we ought to love.”
