My Human Heart: Where Science and Faith Collide

Description

This book began with a simple question: does God truly intervene in the affairs of man?

My journey into investigating and reporting on the Eucharistic Miracle of Buenos Aires—which I believe to be one of the most significant events in Christian history—started unexpectedly in 1987. A priest walked into my law office seeking to secure land for a new church and school. He had no money, only faith that God would provide. What followed was a remarkable sequence of events—so unlikely and yet so precise—that it seemed his prayer had been answered.

This experience left me unsettled. Could God really answer prayers in such a tangible way? Was He an interventionist God, guiding outcomes, responding to faith?

To explore these questions, I began to seek out other instances where people claimed to have witnessed divine intervention. I turned first to the lives of the saints, many of whom were said to have performed or experienced miracles. Scripture, too, is filled with accounts of Jesus performing miraculous acts during His time on earth.

In the Catholic tradition, miracles remain woven into the very fabric of faith. For someone to be canonised a saint, the Church requires verified evidence of a miracle attributed to that person’s intercession. Yet, in our modern, rational world—shaped by Enlightenment thinking—miracles are often dismissed as impossible or as mysteries that science will one day explain.

And yet, throughout history, certain lives stand as enduring witnesses to the miraculous. St Francis of Assisi, who bore the stigmata of Christ’s crucifixion, and St Catherine of Siena, who also received the stigmata and profound dictations from Christ Himself, are among them. Both were recognised not only for their holiness but for the extraordinary, inexplicable signs that accompanied it.

Reading their accounts, I often wondered: what would it have been like to stand beside them—to see these events unfold, to ask questions, and to examine them through the lens of modern science? Were such experiences confined to the distant past, or do they still occur today, unnoticed or dismissed by secular media?

That curiosity led me to investigate claims from South America; reports of a statue of Christ weeping blood, and of a person there experiencing the stigmata—accompanied by mystical writings reminiscent of St Catherine’s revelations. To test these claims, I invited one of Australia’s most senior television investigative journalists—a noted sceptic—to join me in examining the evidence.
It was against this backdrop that I was later invited to assist in the investigation of a claimed Eucharistic miracle in Buenos Aires of 1996, during the time when Pope Francis served as Archbishop of the city. The findings—that a consecrated Host had bled and transformed into tissue from the living heart of a traumatised human being—sent shockwaves through both science and faith.

The final chapter of that investigation is yet to be written. When the genetic data of the Buenos Aires Host is compared to that of the bloodstains on the Shroud of Turin—the cloth believed to be Christ’s burial shroud—the implications could be enormous. A match could offer the most profound evidence in history that the Shroud is indeed the burial cloth of Jesus Christ.

This book tells that story—from its beginnings, where my late wife Gabrielle played a guiding role, to its extraordinary conclusion. In tracing this journey, I have come to see what I can only describe as the hand of God—present not only in miracles but in the quiet, unfolding providence of our own lives.