Lourdes: 69th official miracle announced

Danila Castelli

The Sanctuary of Lourdes has announced the 69th official miracle of Lourdes - the curing of an Italian woman, Danila Castelli, following her visit to the Baths at the Shrine in 1989.

Danila Castelli, born on 16 January 1946, a wife and mother, lived a more or less normal life until the age of 34 when she started having spontaneous and severe blood pressure hypertensive crisis. She also suffered a number of other serious health problems and underwent a hysterectomy an annexectomy and a partial pancreatectomy. As her condition deteriorated, her husband who is a doctor planned to take her to the Mayo Clinic in America, but at the last moment Danila said she wanted to go to Lourdes. The couple went in May 1989. When Danila came out of the Baths she said she experienced an extraordinary feeling of wellbeing. Shortly afterwards she reported to the Lourdes Office of Medical Observations her instantaneous alleged cure. After five meetings (1989, 1992, 1994, 1997 and 2010) the Bureau certified the cure with an unanimous vote. They agreed that Mrs Castelli had been cured, in a complete and lasting way, from the date of her pilgrimage to Lourdes 21 years ago, of the syndrome she had suffered and with no relation with the treatments and the surgeries she received.

Danila Castelli has since gone back to an absolute normal life. The CMIL (Lourdes International Medical Committee) in it's annual meeting of 19 November 2011 in Paris has certified that the cure "remains unexplained according to current scientific knowledge". On 20 June 2013 Monsignor Giovanni Giudici, Bishop of Pavia, the diocese where Danila Castelli lives, declared the 'prodigious-miraculous' character of this 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. www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7ixlLiHnBI