A lesser-known initialism from the past is SAG, which stands for Saint Anthony Guide. People used to write this on the back of their envelopes, seeking help from the patron saint of lost causes, St. Anthony of Padua. This practice dates back to 1729 when a wife tried to communicate with her merchant husband who had travelled from Spain to Peru. After not receiving any response to her letters, she wrote a letter and placed it on a statue of St. Anthony in her local church. Following days of prayer, she found a letter from her husband and some coins at the church, which gave her relief.

For those who send many emails, you could consider adding B.C.G. at the end of your message. Blessed Carlo Acutis was known for his computer skills. He was recognized for his positivity, computer skills, and devotion to the Eucharist, which were central to his life. He was beatified by Pope Francis on 10th October 2020. and on 23rd May 2024, Francis acknowledged a second miracle attributed to Acutis' intercession and approved the process to make him the first Millennial saint.

You could sign off your emails with your name and then a B.C.G. and then an S.C.G. underneath once his canonization process is complete! Read more

"It's a miracle," the Franciscan priest told CNA Tuesday of the near-death experience.

Now retired — although he considers himself "semi" retired — Bok still helps to serve Mass at St Andrew Catholic Church in Milford, Ohio.

On Oct 2, he was on his way to celebrate 9 am Mass on the feast of the Guardian Angels.

It was about 8:40am when Bok was nearing the church. That's when something went wrong with another driver.

Read More

A Vatican medical council concluded recently that a potential miracle attributed to her can be explained by medical science.

Sister Margaret Anne Mills, leader of the Sisters of Compassion in Island Bay, Wellington, says the medical council's ruling means it is time to consider the future path of the official process towards Meri Hohepa Suzanne Aubert's canonisation.

"From my point of view, the miracle is in the life of those concerned in this process.

"I witness daily the gift we have of asking Meri Hohepa to intercede for us on our behalf. It is extraordinary. It is tangible.

"We have much to be grateful for and we are on a journey of faith. I have witnessed the faith and healing of people as they request Meri Hohepa's intercession.

"This will continue," said Mills.

"Meri Hohepa would say at this moment: ‘It is God's will.' She said that ‘when all else fails this is the moment of God.'

"We need to rest in that moment for a while, before deciding where to go next."

Cardinal John Dew, President of the New Zealand Catholic Bishops' Conference, says: "No matter the outcome of the Cause for Beatification, Suzanne Aubert is remembered, through her writings, prayers and sayings, and her life of working for those most in need.

"All of that lives on.

"There is no doubt that Suzanne, Meri Hohepa, was a holy woman, she was greatly loved and respected.

"All she would want is for us all to follow her example and carry on with works of compassion."

The case for a miracle, the details of which remain private to protect the privacy of the person concerned, was put in 2019 to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, the Vatican agency responsible for studying sainthood nominations. The Congregation appointed a medical council to study it.

New Zealand's Catholic bishops approved the introduction of the Cause of Suzanne Aubert's sainthood in 1997.

A formal Diocesan Inquiry was held in 2004, when the available evidence for promoting her as a saint was gathered. The results were sent to Rome and approved for further consideration.

Included with this material was Jessie Munro's biography, The Story of Suzanne Aubert.

As a result, Suzanne Aubert was given the title "Servant of God".

Subsequent presentation and approval of the relevant material led to Pope Francis declaring her "Venerable" in 2016.

After someone is declared venerable, the Catholic Church requires proof of two miracles before they can be declared a saint. Recognition of a first miracle would have resulted in Pope Francis awarding her the title "Blessed," the penultimate step on the path to her being declared "Saint".

Suzanne Aubert (1835-1926) founded the Daughters of Our Lady of Compassion (the Sisters of Compassion) in 1892.

She was a friend and advocate for Maori, children, the poor and the sick, with the Sisters continuing her work to this day.

Thousands lined Wellington's streets for her funeral in 1926, an extraordinary tribute to a woman who dedicated herself to "people of all religions or none."

She continues to be known as Venerable Suzanne Aubert, a woman of outstanding Christian virtue.

Source

• Supplied: National Catholic Communications NZ

The pope authorized the Congregation for the Causes of Saints Sept. 29 to promulgate a decree recognizing a miracle attributed to Gaetana "Nuccia" Tolomeo, paving the way for her beatification.

He also authorized decrees relating to four priests killed during the Spanish Civil War and two founders of religious orders. Read more

The inquiry is being conducted by the Kerala chapter of the Indian Medical Association.

Dr V K Sreenivasan, a paediatrician in Kerala, endorsed the miraculous recovery of a premature baby born at the hospital in 2009.

Sreenivasan says the infant Christopher Jolly's parents and other relatives believed he was saved by his grandmother placing holy relics of Mariam Thresia on his bed and prayer.

Jolly, who is now 10, witnessed Mariam Thresia's canonisation at the Vatican on Sunday.

Dr N Sulphi, who is the chapter secretary for the IMA-Kerala mentioned his concerns about the miracle in a social media post.

He was seeking evidence for such claims.

The IMA Kerala chapter president, Dr ME Sugathan, says many IMA doctors are concerned about Sreenivasan's claim and do not support it.

Sugathan says this is especially so because it involved an element that tarnishes the medical profession.

The IMAs Ethical Committee will investigate and report back on the ethics of Sreenivasan's opinion.

"Obviously there were cases of unexpected improvements in patients' conditions. But doctors generally consider it only as natural improvement or due to oversight in diagnosis," Sugathan says.

He added: "Sreenivasan's view that he had not seen such an improvement in any patients was objected to by most doctors in IMA,"

Sreenivasan is said to have informally commented on some social media groups of doctors that he had only given facts regarding Jolly's treatment. He had not endorsed any magical powers behind the recovery, he is said to have noted.

At the time of publication Sreenivasan had not been contacted as he was yet to return from Vatican after attending Sunday's canonisation ceremony.

Source

• Deccan Herald
• Image: Salt and Light Catholic Media Foundation

Her healing, which saved her life and the life of her unborn child, was accepted as the miracle needed for the 19th-century British cardinal's canonization.

Pope Francis announced July 1 that he will declare Blessed John Henry Newman a saint Oct. 13.

Coincidentally, the miracle accepted for his beatification in 2010 also involved someone from the United States: Deacon Jack Sullivan, 71, of Marshfield, Massachusetts, was healed of a several spinal condition in 2001.

Recounting her own story, Villalobos, 42, told Chicago Catholic that in 2011, "my husband brought home a couple of holy cards with Cardinal Newman's picture on them. I put one in the family room and one in our master bedroom."

"I would pass his picture in the house and I would say little prayers to him for whatever our family's needs were at the time — the children, my husband, myself.

"I really started to develop a very constant dialogue with him," said Villalobos, a mother of seven.

Her prayers had a miraculous result in 2013 when she started bleeding during the first trimester of a pregnancy.

At the time she had four children — ages 6, 5, 3 and 1 — and a previous pregnancy that had ended in miscarriage.

"When I went to the doctor, he did an ultrasound and he said the placenta had become partially detached from the uterine wall, so there was a hole in the placenta and that hole was allowing blood to escape," she said.

Villalobos also developed a subchorionic hematoma, which is a blood clot in the fetal membrane. It was two-and-a-half times the size of the baby.

The doctors recommended bed rest.

On Friday, May 10, 2013, Villalobos went to the emergency room because the bleeding was worse.

Again, the doctor recommended strict bed rest, which was difficult to imagine with four small children and a husband who had to work.

The doctor also told the couple that a miscarriage was likely, but if the baby survived the pregnancy, she would likely be born prematurely because she would be small.

Added to the stress was the fact that Villalobos' husband, David, had to leave for a mandatory business trip.

"Wednesday morning I woke up in bed in a pool of blood. My husband was already in an airplane on his way to Atlanta," Villalobos said.

She put off calling 911 because she didn't know who would care for the kids if she was taken in an ambulance to the hospital.

She made them breakfast and told them to stay put before going upstairs.

"Now the bleeding was really bad because I had just gone up the stairs, which I really shouldn't have done. I kind of collapsed on the bathroom floor out of weakness and desperation."

Villalobos laid there thinking she should now call 911, but she realized she didn't have her cellphone. She also knew the force of yelling for her kids would cause more damage and bleeding.

She was hoping one of her children would wander into her room so she could ask them for her phone to call 911, but they didn't. She heard nothing from her children and the silence made her even more worried.

With thoughts of losing her unborn baby, worry for her children downstairs and wondering if she could die, Villalobos uttered her fateful prayer.

"Then I said, ‘Please, Cardinal Newman, make the bleeding stop.' Those were my exact words. Just then, as soon as I finished the sentence, the bleeding stopped." Continue reading

• Image: Catholic Register

He has also declared several people to have lived lives of heroic virtue.

Newman was beatified by Pope Benedict XVI in 2010. He was a 19th century theologian, poet, Catholic priest and cardinal. Originally an Anglican priest, he converted to Catholicism in 1845. He founded the Oratory of St Philip Neri in England.

After a meeting on Tuesday with Cardinal Angelo Becciu who is the head of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, the pope signed off on a second miracle attributed to Newman's intercession.

Blessed Maria Teresa , who was the founder of the Congregation of the Sisters of the Holy Family, died in 1926 in Kuzhikkattussery, India.

Jesuit Fr Salvatore was killed in hatred of the faith in Ecuador in 1897.

Those declared to have lived lives of heroic virtue and to be on the path to beatification are:

• Cardinal József Mindszenty, archbishop of Esztergom and primate of Hungary (1892-1975);
• Fr Giovanni Battista Zuaboni, founder of the Secular Institute of the Company of the Holy Family (1880-1939);
• Jesuit Fr Manuel Garcia Nieto (1894-1974);
• Sr Serafina Formai, foundress of the Congregation of the Missionary Sisters of the Glad Message (1876-1954).

Source

• Crux Now
• Catholic News Agency
• Image: The Telegraph

On 18 July Ricky Peterson of Kansas City, Kansas revisited St Mary MacKillop's tomb with a prayer of thanksgiving for the seemingly miraculous event that had changed his life a decade earlier.

Peterson first knelt at the tomb as a pilgrim during World Youth Day in 2008 and offered a prayer for McKillop would heal him of the Parkinson's disease. He believes he was cured of the disease while he was praying. Read more

Doctors had already declared Trenton McKinley brain-dead and were set to harvest his organs to donate to five other children.

McKinley says he was in Heaven walking with Jesus and a sibling who died before he was born. Read more

For half her 68 years, Sister Bernadette Moriau had suffered from acute sciatic nerve trouble, making it hard for her to walk.

She recovered suddenly in 2008 after a trip to Lourdes.

Moriau says a few days after her return from Lourdes she felt an overwhelming sense of well-being.

She removed a brace and straightened her foot that had been twisted sideways for years and began to walk normally.

"I heard a voice saying 'remove the apparatus'.

"In an act of faith I took it off. And to my great surprise when I took away the brace and splints, my foot was straightened out and I could move without feeling any pain.

Moriau insists she is "not a star" but just a "little sister" glad to be able to walk freely again.

Her miraculous healing is the 70th event formally recognised as an act of divine intervention at Lourdes.

Source

• Reuters
• Daily Mail
• Image:Daily Mail

Bishop Jacques Benoit-Gonin declared the cure of a Catholic nun who was an invalid for nearly four decades and recovered after making a pilgrimage to Lourdes a miracle.

It was the 70th miraculous recovery attributed to divine intervention in Lourdes.

Benoit-Gonin of the Beauvais diocese north of Paris proclaimed the miracle 10 years after Bernadette Moriau, now 79, went to Lourdes. Read more

The women's ordeal started last week when ISIS fighters entered the church-run sanctuary in Kirkuk where the women were living.

Kirkuk is about 60 kilometres to the south of Mosul.

Speaking through an interpreter, the women said it was about 4am when they heard gunfire and explosions outside.

Hearing people in the building, the women, who had already wrapped themselves in blankets to protect themselves from stray bullets, hid and prayed the rosary.

The fighters then came into the room the women were hiding in, using it as a refuge to eat, pray and hide from Iraqi Army forces.

They also used the beds to care for two of their fighters who were wounded.

"Father, help us," one of them texted Father Roni Momika, a young priest in Erbil who ministers to displaced Christians.

"Are you in contact with the army?"

"Pray to the Virgin Mary. She will protect you" he replied.

I was speaking with them all the time," Momika says.

He says there was "a strong girl" who told him "Father, I will continue speaking with you and tell you all our news and what ISIS is saying."

Momika and the young women say their survival is a miracle as ISIS didn't see them.

Afterwards, one of the girls told Momika "when ISIS entered our room, they didn't see us [and] we feel that the Virgin Mary closed their eyes from seeing us."

Source

• CNN
• Catholic News Agency
• Image: Holy Mass images

The family will be contacted by the diocese in a private manner in order to offer pastoral guidance, according to the local bishop.

The family that owns the statue says the tears have been coming and going for about the past year and a half. Read more

The Archdiocese of Chicago has investigated the inexplicable healing of a young American mother who prayed for Cardinal Newman's intercession when she became afflicted by a "life-threatening pregnancy".

Doctors who treated her reported that they have no explanation for the sudden and complete recovery of the woman, a law graduate.

The file on her case has now been passed to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints.

Blessed Newman was beatified in 2010 after the Vatican approved another miracle in which his intercession was sought.

Continue reading

Preaching at a Mass on Monday at Guayaquil, the Pope said the point of the synod is "to mature a true spiritual discernment and find concrete solutions to the many difficult and important challenges families must confront in our times".

"I ask you to intensify your prayer for this intention so that what still seems to be impure to us, to scandalise us, or frighten us, God ... can transform it into a miracle," he then exhorted the people.

"Families today need this miracle," he said.

The Pope is on a three nation, week-long visit in South America. He is visiting Ecuador, Bolivia and Paraguay.

At the Mass on Monday, Francis spoke directly to struggles faced by Ecuadorean families.

The Pope connected the Gospel reading of the day - the wedding feast at Cana - with miracles that he said people witness every day.

He called on those present to believe that things can always get better.

"This is the good news," Francis told the crowd. "The best of the wines are yet to be drunk; the nicest, most profound and beautiful things for the family are yet to come."

The best "will come in spite of all the variables and statistics which say the opposite," the Pope continued.

"The best wine is yet to come for those who see everything crumbling down."

"Mumble it until you believe it," he told the crowd.

"The best wine is yet to come, and whisper it to the desperate or unloved. Open your heart for the best of wines that will come."

"God always moves out to the peripheries, to those who have run out of wine, those who drink only of discouragement," Francis said.

"Jesus feels weakness to squander his best wine with those that for one reason or another already feel that their jars have been broken."

Sources

• National Catholic Reporter
• Reuters
• Image: Catholic News Agency

A theological commission advising the Congregation for the Causes of Saints has recognised the miraculous recovery of a stillborn baby.

The child's mother and father had prayed to Archbishop Sheen to heal their son, James Engstrom, after he was born in 2010.

Although the baby showed no pulse for an hour after his birth, his heart started beating again and he escaped serious medical problems.

The congregation's cardinals and bishops will now review the case.

If they and Pope Francis approve, Archbishop Sheen could then be beatified.

Archbishop Sheen reached millions of television viewers in the United States with his shows in the 1950s and 1960s.

Continue reading

The Vatican announced that Francis has approved a decree attributing a miracle to the intercession of the Italian pope, and his beatification will take place at the conclusion of the bishops' synod on the family.

On May 6, the Italian news agency, ANSA, reported that the Vatican's Congregation for the Causes of Saints had attributed to Pope Paul's intercession the healing of an unborn baby from an otherwise incurable illness.

Continue reading

The miracle was the healing in the United States of an unborn baby from an otherwise incurable illness.

Doctors forecast the baby would die in the womb, or be born with severely damaged kidneys.

Abortion was offered to the mother, but she refused.

Instead, she took advice given from a nun who was a friend of the family and who had met Giovanni Battista Montini (Paul VI).

The mother prayed for Paul VI's intercession, placing a fragment of his vestments and an image of him on her stomach.

Ten weeks later, medical tests showed a substantial improvement in the baby's health.

The eventual birth was by Caesarean section.

Witnesses agree the case cannot be explained scientifically.

Andrea Tornielli, writing for La Stampa, forecast that Pope Paul's beatification will be in October, at the end of the extraordinary synod on the family.

He predicted Pope Francis would promulgate a decree on the miracle soon.

It was Paul VI who established the synod of bishops in 1965, in response to a request from Vatican II fathers.

He was pope from 1963 to 1978.

Paul VI presided over key reforms from the Second Vatican Council, as well as surviving an assassination attempt at Manila airport in 1970 by a Bolivian surrealist painter.

Pope Paul promulgated a new Roman Missal in 1969.

The year before, he published an apostolic constitution reforming the Roman Curia

The late pope was praised for his efforts to seek closer ties with other Christian denominations, but his 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae banning artificial contraception was controversial.

Pope Benedict XVI promulgated Paul VI's heroic virtues in 2012, bestowing on him the title "Venerable".

Sources

• The Telegraph
• UCA News
• US Catholic
• Catholic News Agency
• Image: Salt and Light TV

The driver for the Greater Dayton Regional Transit Authority told Dayton police he was standing outside the bus when the men shot at him three times, with one bullet hitting his leg. He also was stabbed in the arm. Continue reading