Vatican confirms Colorado boy was healed by nun from the beyond the grave.
The Roman Catholic Church has a rigid, formalized vetting process when evaluating miracles, which are defined as divine events that have no natural or scientific explanation. Investigating a single miracle could take years.
After a 14-year process, the Vatican released its verdict on a young boy’s sudden recovery from a debilitating gastrointestinal condition: It was a miracle.
Doctors tried everything: antibiotics, diets, and tests. But it seemed nothing could stop 4-year-old Luke Burgie from literally wasting away in 1998.
The eight to 10 violent bouts of diarrhea he experienced every day for six months forced him to drop out of preschool. After doctors began to suspect cancer, the boy’s mother, a devout Catholic, began looking outside of medicine for a cure. She asked nuns to pray for Luke.
Sister Margaret Mary Preister and the late Sister Evangeline Spenner knew what to do. They asked the founder of their order, Mother Theresia Bonzel, a German nun who lived 100 years ago, to intervene. The nuns prayed a novena, a nine-day vigil, asking Bonzel to heal Luke.
As soon as their novena was complete, Luke woke up and his stomach no longer hurt him. The illness never returned.
“I knew immediately that it was a miracle,” mother Jan Burgie said.