AP Features, March 30th, 2007
A nun who helps mothers give life in a maternity hospital said Friday she was reborn, discovering how to smile and live again, mysteriously "cured" of Parkinson's disease after imploring Pope John Paul II for help, two months after his death.
Sister Marie-Simon-Pierre's supposed recovery June 2, 2005, from a disease that had been ravaging her for four years, just as it had ravaged the pontiff, could be accepted as the miracle that the Vatican needs to beatify John Paul and eventually help lift him to sainthood.
"Since that day, I take no medicine. My life has totally changed. For me, it is a bit like a second birth," the sister, smiling serenely, told reporters at her first public appearance. "I had the impression I was rediscovering my body."
The word "miracle" hung in the air, unspoken. The 46-year-old Simon-Pierre, diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in 2001, carefully chose another word _ "mystery' _ to describe the sudden healing of her debilitated frame.
The faithful have clamored since the death of John Paul for the Church to make him a saint. That process begins with beatification _ and requires a miracle. A second miracle would be needed for sainthood.
A thick green file bound in a red ribbon containing the findings of a yearlong study of Simon-Pierre's case is to be delivered to Rome on Monday when the Roman Catholic Church marks the second anniversary of the pontiff's death. Sister Simon-Pierre will be there, along with a delegation led by Archbishop Claude Feidt of Aix.
The file, which includes testimony from five experts, three of them neurologists, will be reviewed by a special non-Vatican committee. A favorable response would send the case on to Pope Benedict XVI, the only person who can declare Simon-Pierre's case a miracle.
For a miracle to be recognized, it must be inexplicable in the current state of science and linked to prayer to show possible intercession.
"We cannot speak of a miracle. We can talk of a cure with a sufficiently extraordinary character," said Rev. Luc-Marie Lalanne, who presided over the probe. "We have enough elements for the question to be asked."
Simon-Pierre, the archbishop and Lalanne used broad strokes to describe her illness and the recovery that they contend escapes scientific explanation. Details, they said, must remain secret.
Speaking with a firm voice that quivered at moments with emotion, Simon-Pierre, a nurse, recounted her struggle with Parkinson's, a disease that most often strikes older people. She described how she tried to hide its debilitating effects then nearly gave in to it, deciding to withdraw from her job at a maternity clinic outside Aix-En-Provence, in southeast France.
The disease, a disorder of the central nervous system, includes symptoms such as trembling, rigidity and problems of balance.
Devoted to John Paul, named pope when she was 17, Simon-Pierre watched in sadness as the pontiff's case of Parkinson's worsened and finally was unable to watch him visibly trembling on television, because, she said, she saw what she would become.
"It was too difficult for me." When he died, "I felt as if I had lost a friend."
Simon-Pierre's community, the Little Sisters of Catholic Maternities, pushed her to hold firm. All prayed together to the late pontiff.
A sister gave her a pencil and paper and asked her to write.
"I wrote John Paul II as if to beg him," she said, but the words were nearly illegible.
Later, she said, she went to her room. "I wanted to write ... I felt as if I heard a voice telling me, 'Take your pen and write.'"
She wrote and discovered that what she put on the paper was "very legible."
At 4:30 a.m., she awoke and "jumped out of bed," surprising herself. "I wasn't the same."
She went to the chapel to pray. "I was filled with a great peace."
A left arm that was nearly limp was swinging again, her pinched face smiled and light returned to her life, she said.
"John Paul cured me," she told the other nuns.
When she visited her neurologist a week after stopping medical treatment, "He said, 'Sister, what have you done to be in such shape _ doubled the dose of dopamine?'" Simon-Pierre recounted, referring to the medicine commonly used to treat Parkinson's disease.
Today, Simon-Pierre is working as a nurse at a Paris maternity hospital.
A miracle?
It usually takes decades or even centuries for a person to be beatified, and longer still for sainthood to be conferred with canonization _ which requires a second miracle after that used for the beatification process.
However, few at the Vatican believe that John Paul's case will languish. Pope Benedict waived the five-year waiting period after a person's death for the process to begin _ just as John Paul did for Mother Teresa's beatification.
