Archbishop Anthony Fisher of Sydney this week credited the apparently miraculous survival of an Arizona toddler to the intercession of Cardinal George Pell.
According to the newspaper The Australian, Fisher said at a book event on March 26 that he had learned that an 18-month-old boy had been discharged from a hospital in Phoenix after going 52 minutes without breathing following a fall into a pool.
The boy, named Vincent, “stopped breathing for 52 minutes,” Fisher said at the Australian launch of a new biography about Cardinal George Pell at Campion College near Parramatta.
“His parents prayed for the intercession of Cardinal Pell,” he continued. “The boy survived and came off life support free of any damage to brain or lungs or heart. He’s fine now and his doctors are calling it a miracle.”
The boy’s uncle, a Catholic priest, contacted Father Joseph Hamilton, Pell’s former secretary in Rome, to ask for prayers during the approximate 10-day hospitalization.
Hamilton told The Australian that the family had met the late cardinal when he visited Phoenix in December 2021 to promote his three-volume “Prison Journal,” written during his 13-month imprisonment for historic child sexual abuse, a conviction later unanimously overturned by Australia’s highest court.
Pell had also celebrated a White Mass for medical professionals in Phoenix.
The cardinal died from cardiac arrest following a hip replacement surgery in Rome on Jan. 10, 2023. He was 81.
The Catholic Church usually waits a minimum of five years after death to consider opening a cause for beatification. Once a process — which can take years, decades, or longer — is open, one verified miracle is needed to declare a person “blessed,” the last step before he or she can be declared a canonized saint.
The Church subjects miracles submitted in a beatification cause to rigorous scrutiny and examination by medical professionals to exclude any natural or scientific reasons for healings before pronouncing them to be miracles received through the prayerful intercession of a virtuous man or woman.
