The article ‘No divine or supernatural events at Borġ in-Nadur’ (The Sunday Times of Malta, January 10) stated that forensic investigator Anthony Abela Medici and forensic pathologist Albert Cilia-Vincenti were commissioned by the Archbishop to investigate blood and fluid found on a statue of the Virgin Mary.

Abela Medici carried out these tests. I am not a forensic pathologist and was not commissioned by the Archbishop. I was a pathologist to Her Majesty’s Coroner in London and Hampshire but declined to be appointed Home Office forensic pathologist in Hampshire, as I was not interested in crime pathology. I also subsequently declined to be appointed a court forensic pathologist in Malta.

I only got involved in this Borġ in-Nadur affair momentarily when I was made to replace another person on a Xarabank panel discussing the claimed happenings to Angelik Caruana. I have to admit I hated being on that panel discussing such a hot subject as religious faith and miracles, and tried to say as little as possible. However, Peppi Azzopardi put up a picture of skin injuries on Caruana’s wrists and asked me to comment, obviously wanting to know whether these were stigmata or not.

All I could say from a picture on a screen was that I could not distinguish those skin abrasion-like injuries from a possibly self-inflicted injury such as a cigarette burn. I also added that these so-called stigmata are said to have started with St Francis of Assisi and appear to have been described only in Roman Catholic areas of the world, meaning I found it strange that an all-loving God was ignoring the rest of the world.

Towards the end of the programme, Azzopardi said I had been very quiet and asked me to comment on miraculous cures. I said one had to be careful when looking into these claims because medical science does indeed record rare cases of spontaneous resolution of normally incurable disease in non-religious people. It is well documented, for example, that disseminated malignant melanoma, one of the most lethal cancers, on very rare occasions, disappears spontaneously.

The medical explanation is that for some reason, the body’s immune system suddenly ‘learns’ how to destroy the cancer cells. This was past ‘science fiction’ but is currently the advancing edge of new cancer drug development. These new drugs are meant to prevent the cancer cells from ‘hiding’ from the immune system’s cancer-killing cells and to ‘switch on’ the latter into active mode. The hope is that eventually, immune-modulating cancer drugs will truly become magic (‘miraculous’) cancer-killing bullets.

I was struck by one comment from a young lady during that Xarabank programme – she suggested that religious teaching in schools should include all the major religions.