PHILADELPHIA -- When doctors first diagnosed 1-year-old Amy Wall with incurable nerve deafness several years ago, her parents prayed that their baby might someday learn sign language.
But Amy's 7-year-old brother, Jack, believed in miracles. He wanted Amy to hear. And he demanded they pray for a cure.So the Bucks County, Pa., family prayed to the late Mother Katharine Drexel, a Roman Catholic nun from Philadelphia who devoted her life to the poor. Months later, Amy was not only hearing -- but speaking.
On Thursday, Pope John Paul II declared Amy's cure a miracle, one that clears the way for Mother Drexel to be named a saint of the Catholic Church.
"Just this morning in Rome, our Holy Father issued a declaration officially recognizing a second miracle attributed to Blessed Katharine Drexel," Cardinal Anthony J. Bevilacqua told a gathering at her national shrine in Bensalem, with Amy and her family sitting behind him.
Two officially recognized miracles are among the requirements for Catholic sainthood. The Vatican concluded in 1988 that a Bensalem boy, Robert Gutherman, was miraculously cured of deafness in 1974 after his family prayed to Mother Drexel for intercession.
Mother Drexel, heiress to an enormous banking fortune, entered religious life as a young woman and in 1891 founded the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, an order with special ministry to poor blacks and Native Americans.
She lived in poverty the rest of her life, spending her millions to build schools, missions and orphanages across the South and Southwest, until her death at 96 in 1955.
Thursday's papal announcement stopped short of announcing Mother Drexel's canonization, but Cardinal Bevilacqua said that no obstacles remained and that "she will assuredly soon be called St. Katharine Drexel." The canonization ceremony will likely take place in Rome this fall, he said.
"This is the day that the Lord has made!" Sister Beatrice Jeffries, vice president of the order, told the news conference.
"Can you believe it's finally happened?" she asked the many elderly sisters in attendance, who laughed and clapped at the news.
Sister Beatrice then turned the lectern over to the Walls, whose identities the archdiocese had concealed since it began investigating Amy's putative miracle in 1994. The family declined at the news conference to identify their hometown for the sake of privacy.
"Here's our little miracle girl," Constance Wall said, as Amy -- short for Amanda -- stepped onto a stool behind the lectern and gazed uncertainly at the lights and cameras.
Constance Wall began to suspect deafness soon after Amy's birth in 1992, but her husband, John, a real estate developer, refused at first to acknowledge it.
Then, one day, "without Amy looking at me, I came up behind her high chair and clapped my hands," John Wall recalled. "She did not startle. That's what made me believe."
Hospital examinations in September 1993 concluded she suffered from congenital and permanent failure of the auditory nerves.
"The doctors said, 'Get used to it,' " Constance Wall recalled tearfully. "So we just prayed for communication -- that she got sign language. If she could sign for her bottle, we thought we would have everything."
That's when Jack -- who had learned about miracles and prayer in parochial school -- announced, "That's not enough. I'm going to pray for a cure," his mother said.
After seeing a PBS television special about young Robert Gutherman, who was born deaf but spontaneously grew a missing bone in his ear after his family prayed to Mother Drexel, the Walls asked the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament for a relic of Katharine's, which they laid on Amy's ear. John Wall, then a Baptist, admitted in an interview yesterday he was skeptical of the Catholic veneration of relics and saints, "but I was watching."
Meanwhile, Amy's 3-year-old sister, Jeanette, was praying for her own special miracle.
"She prayed that if Amy can't hear, she can't, too, 'so we can be the same,' " Constance Wall said, sending a gasp through the audience.
Then, in March 1994, Amy's preschool teacher noticed Amy was being startled by loud sounds. Hospital tests that month showed her hearing was inexplicably normal -- "perfect," her mother said.
"When it happened, I wasn't even sure I knew what I was seeing happen," her mother recalled. John Wall was so convinced he converted to Catholicism in 1998.
Asked if she and Amy are now "the same," Jeanette, now 9, nodded and replied, "We go sledding."
In a brief interview after the news conference, Amy added: "We both have American Girl dolls, only mine's hair is darker. And one," she said with a laugh, "has a broken leg."
Robert Gutherman, now 40, the subject of the earlier deafness cure attributed to Mother Drexel, sat with the family during Thursday's announcement but did not address the news conference. Afterward, he declared it a "great day."
"Most people think God is way up in heaven and Jesus was 2,000 years ago," he said, grinning broadly.
But Amy's cure "affirms our belief that Mother Katharine is in heaven and truly a saint worth emulating, and that Jesus is alive and working miracles in today's times," said Gutherman, now the married father of two young daughters and an executive in direct-mail marketing.
A miracle, he said, "changes your life."
The effort to have Mother Drexel canonized was begun in 1962 under the late Cardinal John Krol.
In 1987 she was declared "venerable," or worthy of emulation, and declared "blessed" after the Vatican officially ascribed Gutherman's cure to her intercession.
Before Pope John Paul II's pontificate, candidates had to be credited with three miracles for sainthood, and a so-called devil's advocate would amass potential evidence to disqualifying them.
John Paul, who has recognized nearly 300 saints -- more than any other pope -- reduced the number of necessary miracles to two and eliminated the devil's advocate role, although the cause must pass through many reviews in both Rome and the candidate's "home" diocese.
Mother Drexel, whose feast day is March 3, would be the fourth American saint, and Philadelphia's second after St. John Neumann, a 19th-century bishop here.
Cardinal Bevilacqua, who sat with the family during short interviews after the news conference, said the Catholic Church teaches that only God works miracles, not the saints, and that "no one knows" how saints intercede on behalf of their petitioners.
"God allows us to pray," he said with a shrug. "But we don't know how it works."