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Becoming a Saint
Dear Families,
I remember learning about the canonization process in school. One thing that stuck with me was the miracle verification, because who doesn’t love a good miracle? The problem was I had it entirely backwards. I knew that to be declared a Saint, one needed to have two documented miracles to their name. I thought that those were miracles that they completed while alive, thus nurturing my image of saints as somehow being magical, or perhaps having a direct phone line to God, that they could call in times of distress, and voila, a miracle. I was wrong. The truth is much more compelling.
The required and verified miracles occur not during one’s lifetime on Earth, but after it. How does one perform a miracle while dead? Well, that’s the key, and the component that implies sainthood. Here’s a story of one of St. John Paul II’s miracles:
“The second miracle leading to the canonization of John Paul II concerned a 50-year-old woman from Santiago, Costa Rica, Floribeth Mora Diaz.
Diaz suffered a brain aneurysm in April 2011, after a series of tests in a hospital, including a brain scan and a three-hour operation—the doctors told her that her condition was inoperable and terminal and that she would have only one month to live…
…She…began praying to Pope John Paul II for his intercession. Coincidentally, Pope John Paul II's beatification was scheduled for May 1, 2011, and Floribeth decided to watch the events on TV. After watching the beatification, she went to sleep but was awakened by John Paul's words, “Get Up! Don’t be afraid!”
Much to her husband's surprise, she got out of bed and told him she felt well. She also informed him about her encounter with the deceased pontiff. Floribeth subsequently underwent several medical tests—including new brain scans—which left her neurologist and other doctors wholly stupefied. They declared that her virtually instantaneous cure was scientifically inexplicable by any known natural agency.”
The thing about these miracles is that their happening after John Paul’s death implies that he still lives even today, perhaps in a sense even more alive than we are currently. We know this because he listens, and he intercedes with God on our behalf. There is that direct phone-line, the communion of Saints in heaven, that can even occasionally produce miracles among those still on Earth.
That is why we celebrate the Saints at St. Mary’s Visitation Catholic School. We invite you to join us at Mass next Friday, and you’re welcome to visit school that afternoon to view our Saints Museum, created by our middle school students. Our fourth graders will be walking down to the cemetery that day, to remember and pray for the dead. Some of them, though not officially canonized, may even be Saints themselves.
Like the Saints, our faith here at SMV is alive and vibrant, and we hope that through it, all of us will one day join them in that eternal communion with God in heaven.
God Bless,
Siggy Spelter
Principal
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