Dying Roman woman recovers after friend brings dust from St. Gabriel's grave

ROME, 1897 AD — Saint Gabriel of Our Lady of Sorrows is buried at Isola, in the Abruzzi. The register kept there lists about ninety complete and instantaneous cures of hernia this year.

St. Gabriel was a Passionist student who died of tuberculosis at his order’s house at Isola in 1862 AD, before he could be ordained. The Passionists want the Church to declare him Blessed, and sick people in many parts of Italy already pray to him.

St. Gabriel was buried in the crypt of the church at Isola, and his grave stayed closed for thirty years. In October 1892 AD, as a first step in the cause, delegates of the Bishop of Penne opened it, and about four thousand people covered the hill to watch. They found only his bones, and moved them to a new tomb in the chapel of St. Paul of the Cross. Two days later Father Germanus, the Passionist priest in charge of the cause, hung St. Gabriel’s crucifix round the neck of Mary Mazzarella, a twenty-year-old of Isola who had been ill with tuberculosis for nearly three years. He also fastened on her the leather belt taken from St. Gabriel’s grave. After three days of prayer she woke cured. She went barefoot to the tomb with her family, and everyone in Isola walked with them.

After that, people began to use dust gathered from the grave, and some of them were cured. A young man from Morgia, swollen with dropsy, applied some at the tomb and was cured that night. A woman near Ascoli Piceno washed a cancer once with water in which she had mixed some of the dust, and the cancer healed. By 1896 AD, 380 extraordinary events attributed to St. Gabriel had been recorded. That year Father Germanus wrote an account of them. He wrote that only the Church could judge the cures, and that he would not get ahead of its judgment. Father Germanus would set down, he wrote, only “what has been seen with the eyes, and as it were, touched with the hands.” On July 7, 1896 AD, Pope Leo XIII authorized the formal opening of the cause.

On January 5 this year the officials of the cause ruled that it could go on. The Church forbids anyone to treat a candidate in public as if he had already been declared Blessed or a saint, and the officials first had to check that no one had done so. They found that no such worship had been paid to St. Gabriel. Pope Leo XIII then excused the cause from proving that people held St. Gabriel to be holy. He gave his reason in the decree: “It is as clear as the sun that his renown is at this moment spread abroad everywhere, and is increasing day by day.” The Pope’s own inquiry into St. Gabriel’s virtues and miracles then began, with one commission at Penne, one at Teramo and one in Rome. The hearings ended this year.

The Church first decides whether a candidate lived an exceptionally holy life, and only then turns to the cures. Once it has ruled that St. Gabriel did so, it will examine the cures put forward as miracles, questioning the witnesses and reading the documents. When the cures rest on eyewitnesses, it usually asks for two. Violanta Moretti’s recovery was not among the cures the cause later put before its judges.

In Rome this year, Violanta Moretti was dying. The priest attending her was saying the prayers for the dying. Her friend Josephine Alessandrini came into the room with some of the dust from St. Gabriel’s grave and gave it to her. Violanta Moretti took the dust and recovered on the spot, in perfect health.