Cardinal Ottavian, in an article that he wrote in the Osservatore Romano in 1951, pointed out that there has been a very great change in the way in which people regard the possibility of miracles today as compared with fifty years ago. Then, under the influence of Modernism and liberal criticism, the tendency was to reject as absurd an element of ‘wonder working’, or miracle from religion, and to regard any accounts of events purporting to be miraculous as suspect. Now, he observed, the climate of opinion has changed. There is a tendency to be interested in paranormal phenomena, and among certain people this interest has degenerated into an uncritical and irrational appetite for the marvellous in religion. It is very easy, when subjected to such influences, to become interested in the marvellous for its own sake and to regard the supernatural as only consisting in the wonderful and inexplicable. One becomes more interested in stories of miracles worked by saints than in the saints themselves, and the consequent dislocation of religious concentration can lead to outbursts of superstition.