Lourdes ‘miracle’ is official

Lourdes - The Roman Catholic Church has recognised as “miraculous” the case of an Italian woman who recovered from a serious illness after a pilgrimage to Lourdes in 1952, the sanctuary said on Monday.

Anna Santaniello’s recovery has become the 67th “miracle cure” officially attributed to the sanctuary in south-western France.

Lourdes is Christianity’s most-visited place of pilgrimage after Rome.

Now aged 94, Santaniello had Bouillaud’s disease, a rheumatic condition that causes trouble with speaking and walking, as well as acute asthma attacks, cyanosis of the face and lips, and swelling of the legs.

She has returned several times to Lourdes as a nurse.

In 1961, the international medical committee at the sanctuary described her case as “extraordinary”.

Every year, about six million pilgrims flock to the small town at the foothills of the Pyrenees, where the Virgin Mary is claimed to have appeared to a young miller’s daughter, Bernadette Soubirous, inside a cave in 1858.

Among the pilgrims are hundreds of thousands of sick and handicapped, fervently praying for a cure from the holy power of the site’s spring water.

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