Aliens in This World

The Vatican’s looking into whether it can accept a rather unusual miracle. They usually like the healing stuff, because miraculous healing unexplainable by science is a pretty straightforward thing to investigate and prove. You just hire a bunch of House, M.D. type doctors and let them do it. Easy.

However, you do sometimes get the more action-oriented miracles. For example, there was the saint who was called upon for intercession by a Chilean submarine guy, who provided him with supernatural strength to close a hatch despite verifiably huge amounts of water and pressure. Again, something verifiably mysterious.

Now we get a sister in Mexico of the reformed-type Bridgettines, who called upon the foundress of the reformed version in the face of a thug’s gun. The gun did not fire. Is this a miracle, or just bad gun maintenance? Who do you get to sit on the panel of investigation? (Maybe Lawdog….)

Anyway, I happen to have a copy of Blessed Elisabetta Hesselblad’s biography. (Parish used book sales rock. You never know what you’ll get.) Blessed Elisabetta mostly did things like bring back super-cool habits and sisters to Scandinavia. But she was a Swedish nurse before that, after she immigrated to the US and worked in a New York hospital.

She ended up locked in the morgue on Halloween night.

And then she heard someone moving inside the drawers…

So she opened it and became the first martyr to zombie odium fidei!

Just kidding… Seriously, though, she started praying for the dead folks, and found some poor guy actually was still warm — because he was still alive! She saved his life by being there.

So yeah, I’m sure she would be a good saint to go to, on these unexpected little occasions that make life interesting. Like when a Mexican thug has a gun pointed at your head.