An initiative by some Catholics to name the first Black American saint will need to meet a stringent test: evidence that praying to the person resulted in a miracle.
Last month at a church in Baltimore, a group of Catholics launched a campaign calling on Pope Francis to name six men and women the first Black Catholic saints from the U.S. The six candidates include Mother Mary Elizabeth Lange , who founded a school for Black girls in Baltimore in 1828, and the Rev. Augustus Tolton , who was born in slavery and studied for the priesthood in Rome after being rejected from every American seminary to which he had applied.
Pope Francis, in remarks to Vatican officials two years ago, reaffirmed “the necessity of the miracle” in deciding that someone is a saint. “It takes a miracle because it is precisely the hand of God there. Without a clear intervention of the Lord, we cannot go ahead,” the pope said. Sainthood candidate Henriette Delille is depicted in a stained-glass window at St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans, La.When it comes to saints, a miracle is “divine confirmation of what is a human judgment” that a person led a holy life and is now in heaven, said Msgr. Robert J. Sarno, an American who worked for the Vatican’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints for 38 years until his retirement last year. That is why the miracle in question must have occurred after the proposed saint’s death.
But the importance of saints, Msgr. Sarno says, lies more in their exemplary function. Devotion to these role models is a living relationship in which prayers for intercession have their natural place, like requests for help to members of one’s family. Shortly after receiving the news, the couple left for a weeklong pilgrimage to Catholic shrines in Italy, Spain and Portugal. During that time, they prayed to Father McGivney that their son would survive. When they came back to Tennessee, doctors discovered that the fatal condition had disappeared. Michael Schachle was born less than two months later, and five years after that Pope Francis recognized the event as miraculous.
“Medicine, science and doctors are key to the Vatican’s process of investigating miracles,” writes Jacalyn Duffin, a Canadian medical historian and hematologist who has studied more than 1,400 miracle investigations in Vatican archives. “Doctors serve as essential witnesses from science—the polar opposite of religion.”
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