By Sarah Mac Donald - 22 July, 2013
A sixty-ninth miracle associated with the French shrine town of Lourdes has been recognised.
The miracle relates to an Italian pilgrim who visited the baths in the shrine in 1989 with serious health problems.
Danila Castelli, a wife and mother, was coping with severe high blood pressure as well as other serious health problems. She had undergone a hysterectomy, an annexectomy and a partial pancreatectomy.
Her husband, a medical doctor, intended to take the then 43-year-old to the famous Mayo Clinic in the USA as her condition disimproved.
But then Danila Castelli asked instead to be taken to Lourdes and the couple went in May 1989.
According to Mrs Castelli, she felt “an extraordinary feeling of well-being” as she emerged from the baths in Lourdes.
A medical check showed she was completely cured of her ailments and this was then documented by the Lourdes Office of Medical Observations, whose experts met Mrs Castelli in 1989, 1992, 1994, 1997 and 2010.
They agreed that she had been cured, in a complete and lasting way, from the date of her pilgrimage to Lourdes in 1989 of the symptoms she had suffered.
Danila Castelli now lives a completely normal life.
The Lourdes International Medical Committee in it’s annual meeting of 19 November 2011 in Paris certified that the cure “remains unexplained according to current scientific knowledge”.
On 20 June 2013 Mgr Giovanni Giudici, Bishop of Pavia, the diocese where Danila Castelli lives, declared the “prodigious-miraculous” character of the cure.
In this video, Dr Allessandro De Franciscus, Director of the Medical Bureau at Lourdes, explains the rigorous process by which the cure was accepted. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7ixlLiHnBI
Courtesy: Independent Catholic News (ICN) http://www.indcatholicnews.com/
