The Exorcist Files - Miracles and Saints with Msgr. Robert Sarno

Episode Date: April 4, 2024

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This is how high the Catholic Church sets the bar in proving that someone is a saint. In other words, you do not have to be Catholic or even believe in God to follow the church's investigation. The miracle that ultimately proves the individual is in heaven has been rigorously worked through reason, is based on evidence, proof, and sound logic. Hello, Exorcist Files listeners. Okay, first off, this Kickstarter, I am just speechless. I am without speech. As a team, we are so grateful and honored that you have supported us so much. Thank you.

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Today we are going to hear from someone who held perhaps the most interesting job in the world, or at least one of them, miracle investigations for the Vatican and helping determine who becomes a saint. Ah, do I have your attention now? It's, well, what I consider to be one of the more fascinating things about the Catholic Church, and the best part is, you don't even have to be Catholic or religious at all to appreciate the examination. The Catholic Church today has a rigorous and thorough process to investigate miracles involving doctors and experts, and it is not an easy one to pass. Not only does the miracle have to be physical, sorry, no emotional breakthroughs here.

The miracle has to be theological, meaning the timing has to be beyond the realm of coincidence. Now, why does this matter? In Catholic doctrine, Christians are encouraged to ask the saints in heaven to intercede or pray for them. Catholics will say that conceptually it's not much different than asking someone on earth to pray for you, and except these are people of remarkable holiness. And to be clear, you do not worship the saint. The Catholic Church is also very clear on that. Now, what makes this process that we're talking about so interesting, especially to me, is that the miracles we are talking about today are cases where people asked a would be saint to pray for them. Is it proof of the intercession of the saints? Or just that

God heals in mysterious ways, and anyone who comes to him with a humble heart seeking him can get healing. The implications of these investigations are worth talking about. If you've ever wondered how someone becomes a saint, get that ST in front of your name, this is your episode. If you are curious whether there is any good evidence today for miracles occurring, this is also your episode. And if you are interested in becoming a canonized saint yourself, listen up. It's not easy, and the requirements might be. be a little sobering. So with us today is the man who helped lead that process for almost four decades. He's a dear friend of Father Martins and one of the sharpest people you will ever meet.

Father Martins, tell us a little bit about our special guest today. Monsignor Sarno and I had been friends for over 25 years. He was an early mentor for me in the area of relics. I contacted him at the Vatican in the late 1990s when I had some questions. Later I got acquainted with him on a more friendly level when I was taking a class he was teaching on the process of canonization, the Vatican saint-making process. We had lunch together each day. I consider him to be one of my closest friends, and we speak to each other regularly. For almost 40 years, Monsignor Sarno was an important official of the Catholic Church's saint-making process. He is extremely sharp and intelligent and greatly respects the church and its law. He took great pains to apply that law

in the many cases that came across his desk during his 38 years in Rome. I'll attest. The man is brilliant. Monsignor Sarno has been exceptionally kind and generous to me over the years, and I never grow tired of his anecdotes. Like Father Martins, though, he is judicious with his laughs and has yet to respond to one of my dad jokes. Pope John Paul II had great confidence in Monsignor Sarno. Case in point, the Vatican had a process underway to beatify a large group of Ukrainian martyrs for his first apostolic visit to Ukraine in June 2001. The process, however, was stalled because one of the martyrs, Father Andre Ischak, who was shot by Soviet soldiers,

was identified by them as a thief, who was shot in the process of fleeing from the law after committing a crime. Everyone knew the soldiers were untrustworthy, but as long as their testimony existed, Father Ischak could not be beatified. The process of sainthood in the Catholic Church is so rigorous that there must be all green lights. Even the testimony of a soldier from a totalitarian regime is taken seriously. Monsignor Sarno was given special permission by the Pope to investigate the case.

Monsignor Sarno was given a special commission by the Pope to investigate the case, he reports. He found they were in contradiction. The arrest to report stated that Father Sarno was given a special commission. Ishak was shot while running away from the soldiers. The autopsy report, however, showed that he was shot with a bullet coming down on him from above, consistent with someone who was executed while kneeling. Monsignor's discovery of these facts proved that the soldiers' report was untrustworthy and that their testimony was worthless. Thus, on June 27, 2001, Pope John Paul II beatified 27 martyrs for the Ukrainian Catholic Church, among them was Father Andri Yashak.

Folks, you're in for a treat. Monsignor Sarno is a master, possessing one of the greatest investigative minds in the Catholic Church. So with that, let's get to the show. Please welcome Monsignor Robert Sarno. My name is Robert Sarno. I'm a priest ordained for the diocese of Brooklyn. I worked for nine years in parishes here in the diocese.

And then I went to Rome and worked for 38 years at what was then the congregation, what is now the dicastory for the causes of the saints. In other words, we handled questions regarding the beatification and canonization of servants of God as saints. I have a doctorate in Canaan Law from the Gregorian University in Rome. I have a licentiate in theology with a specialization in dogmatic theology or ecclesiology from the Gregorian University. I have a Masters of Divinity in Theology from here at the Immaculate Conception Seminary. The last three years, I've been back home. I have retired from the Dicastry, and for the last three years, I've been here living in Queens, New York,

but still dipping my fingers into some stuff in causes of canonization here and there. I was pleased to know a key figure in helping determine sainthood has more degrees than I can count. Growing up in a more evangelical tradition, I didn't have much exposure to the saints, other than Drew Breeze and some fantastic football. Having now worked on the show, I've discovered a rich depth that I never knew with these Christian heroes. Monsignor Sarno shared why he thinks they are such a gift to us. It's simply because people are interested in the incredible holiness of these people,

how they've lived extraordinary lives just today at lunch. When I explained the servant of God Joseph Dutton, who was a layman who worked for 44 years on the island of Molokai, with Father Damien and Sister Marianne Cope with those people suffering from leprosy, that he was shocked that someone would give 44 years of his life to living on that somewhat deserted island with all of these victims of leprosy, basically spending his time taking care of the young men and the boys and the older men, educating them, washing and dry and cleaning their wounds and their sores, and then finally burying them.

This fascinated him, just as, for example, it might fascinate people, a case I had of an Italian magistrate or judge who was killed by the mafia in 1990. These kinds of extraordinary expressions of holiness in today's world, on the one hand, are fascinating for people, but also, I think, encourage people to live their faith stronger and more forcefully, if you will. Now, as we hinted at, Unsignor Sarno is in a very cool line of work, essentially helping determine, through an investigation, who gets to be a saint. So for all you who are wondering if you have what it takes to be a saint, now is the time to pay attention. The Vatican's process of canonizing a saint, known as canonization,

involve several meticulous stages overseen by an office called the DeCastry for the causes of the saints. The investigation, which starts at the local level, looks at the candidate's life thoroughly for evidence of virtue, holiness, and of course, miracles attributed to their intercession or prayer. This is where Manciniar Sarno spent a good deal of his time. Technically speaking, the reason why they were called and are called causes is because there was a very juridical, legal approach to these issues. In other words, you have to be able to prove in the external forum with evidence and eyewitness testimony regarding the life, the martyrdom or the virtues or the offering of life,

as well as the reputation of holiness and of intercessory power of a servant of God. In other words, all of that has to be done in a very clear, juridical, what we call canonical legal fashion, so that your evidence and your proofs carry weight and can be verified in what we call the external forum, in other words, the real world. So they were called causes, and they still are, in order to indicate this partial juridic nature of causes of canonization,

of the declaration of someone that someone is a saint. In other words, it doesn't simply rely on the opinion or the thought of individuals, which can be very influenced by the media, social media, etc. But rather, there has to be an actual juridical legal process in which the proofs are collected. Now, before we move on, Father Martins wanted to elaborate a bit more on this notion of external forum and its counterpart internal forum to help us better understand this term. In his interview, Monsignor Sarno mentions something called the external forum, a canonical term that must be explained in light of its counterpart, the internal form.

The internal forum is the realm of conscience. For that reason, it is private and normally secret. When you disclose something from the internal forum to someone, such as your sins to your spiritual director and the motives behind your private actions to perhaps your spouse, you are disclosing something secret, private and confidential, something not for public consumption. The external forum, on the other hand, is the opposite. Matters of the external forum are observable and public.

They are objective. So what Monsignor means by saying that the investigation of the process of sainthood is a matter of the external forum, he is saying that the investigation is based on provable facts that run through an objective process. No one is declared a saint based merely on someone's feelings that someone ought to be a saint. Even the fact that the person is being posed for a sainthood did many heroic deeds is not enough. In the process that the church uses, heaven itself must testify through the granting of objectively verifiable miracles that the person is indeed a saint. something in the external form means it is provable such that any person of reason can see that it is the case.

This is how high the Catholic Church sets the bar in proving that someone is a saint. In other words, you do not have to be Catholic or even believe in God to follow the church's investigation. The miracle that ultimately proves the individual is in heaven has been rigorously worked through reason, is based on evidence, proof, and sound logic. It is not a matter involving religious faith per se. And what is proved, in the case of, for example, a medical healing is three things. Number one, the healing was complete and not partial. Number two, that it was sudden and not gradual,

occurring after the intercession of the relevant person being proposed for Sainthood was invoked. And that invocation must itself be provable. And three, there must be absolutely no scientific. scientific explanation for the subsequent healing. And it is a team of doctors and scientists employed by universities and hospitals that pronounce this judgment and not the church. So again, Father and Monsignor are saying that this has to be something that is verifiable. For the longtime listeners of the show, you might be picking up on a common theme from Catholic theology,

the desire for verification and certainty. As we discussed in Eucharistic Miracles episode, the church does not recognize every alleged miracle. They distinguish between what can be verified and what cannot. Remember the alleged Argentinian Eucharistic miracle we discussed a couple episodes ago? Despite the compelling arguments Father Spitzer made, the Vatican has still not declared that to be a miracle. Also, think about it. It would not look good to canonize someone and have a miracle later unproven.

I hate the word sainthood because it kind of like creates a false category of special people. The essential element of Christian faith, and I say Christian because it's, Protestant as well as Catholic. What is common to us is this idea of we are called to be holy. That scripture says very clearly, be holy for I, the Lord, your God, am holy. So in other words, we are all called to be holy. When we close our eyes in death, if we don't open our eyes in heaven in the presence of God, we're in big trouble. And that's what a saint is, someone who's in heaven with God. When we speak about a canonized saint in the Catholic Church, we are talking about someone who has been given by God a special charism or gift for the faithful. In other words,

the faithful who are on this journey, this pilgrimage to heaven, are met with very difficult and problematic moments and times and circumstances. And a saint is someone who can serve as a model of intercession. And first and foremost, though, a model of imitation. I appreciated Monsignor's perspective that you don't have to be Catholic to cherish the saints. All Christians are called to imitate Christ and be holy. Saints are folks who have lived lives of tremendous virtue. Regardless if one agrees doctrinally with asking saints to intercede, we can all find inspiration in the lives and acts of these incredible people. You don't have to be religious to be deeply moved by Mother Teresa's humanitarian work, or Father Maximilian Colby's sacrifice when he laid down his life

in exchange for another at Auschwitz, or Damien of Molokai, who went to live in serve a leper colony on the Hawaiian island, building homes and ministering, eventually contracting and dying of the disease himself. The saints are a gift to all of us. I like to say a saint has two eyes, the eye for imitation and the eye for intercession. And so when we speak about saints in canonization, we have to understand the Christian doctrine, which is in the Nicene creed, as well as in the Apostles' Creed, of this what we call the communion of saints, the The word communion itself means Pum Unio to be in union with. The saints in heaven, those in purgatory on their way to heaven, and those in earth,

are united by faith, hope, and love. And therefore, as a family, as friends, we can help each other, we can pray for one another. So while we are trapped, if you will, by space and time here on earth, the saints in heaven are not. they are open to the reality, the eternal reality, which is God and which they share. And so they participate in our lives, but in different ways. In other words, we cannot see them, we cannot hear them, we cannot touch them. But in reality, they are part of our family, our communion. And so therefore, I should say the Christian doctrine of the communion of saints,

is basically that being a family, we can care for one another, we can pray for one another. and God hears our prayers as we join together. And so canonize saints are people who God has given special gifts to it for the people. So in other words, they're kind of like signposts on the road to heaven. And oftentimes they're God's way of telling us, good job. You're on the right road. Hold on. You're not going on the right road.

So we have saints in so many different walks of life. We have those saints who are bishops and priests and popes. and lay people. We have saints who are married, unmarried. We have saints who are doctors and lawyers, teachers, dock workers, simple folks. In other words, each individual who's lived out the vocation to be holy as God is holy in a very specific way, in a very specific place, at a very specific time. And therefore, they are examples that are proposed to the faithful for imitation. So in other words, we can identify with some saints because of our own person. so the life, reality, circumstances, etc.

And at the same time, they have a universal sense that being saints in heaven, they are part of that communion which joins together with the saints on earth to pray to God that basically we who are still on earth will make the grade and get to heaven. The Christian view of the communion of saints is a robust and ancient doctrine. Importantly, Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox Christians all hold this doctrine as a primary, way to think about the church, heaven, and our lives with Christ on earth. Although there are points of divergence between these traditions, an understanding of the Christian family existing throughout time and space is a big one

that touches everything from baptism to discipleship and even eschatology, that part of theology that deals with death, judgment, and the final destiny of the soul. Given the historic nature of this doctrine and its connection to Catholic theology, I asked Monsignor Sarno to give us a quick history on sainthood and how the theology developed. the answer was not quite what I expected. Basically, it started at the very beginning of the church. The early experience of the catacombs was for the faithful a horrendous, a horrific moment. And basically what happened was, is they saw their family members, their friends,

undergo this persecution and this death. In order not to deny faith in Christ, they preferred death. And so what happened was is that they were buried in the kids. catacombs and the faithful went there and they prayed there. They prayed for God's grace to be able to imitate what this individual who was buried in the catacombs had done. In other words, had remained faithful to Christ rather than worship the gods or worship the emperor. And so from the very beginning of the church after the ascension of the Lord into heaven, there was this tendency to want to imitate the person who had suffered persecution,

who had suffered a violent death, rather than be unfaithful to Christ and to his or her faith. When Christianity was recognized as the official religion of the empire and the persecutions decreased rapidly, they began a process of honoring these people by raising them up out of the catacombs and building a basilica, or a church in their honor above ground.

And this was the form of canonization. The declaration, basically, that the person was imitatable, had the power of intercession because the person was in heaven with God, and therefore was for us a sign of God's consoling, comforting, healing, presence among us. As time went on then, what developed was what we call desert spirit, around the second or the third, fourth centuries, where people believed that the best way to be holy was to basically flee the world

and go off into the desert and separate yourselves from all the temptations of the world and be holy. From there, it developed into what we call monasticism, the monastery. Monastic life was kind of living heaven on earth. And so the men would gather in the monastery, gather in the monasteries, which kind of like was a symbol of heaven, and the women would gather in convents. And there they would live a communal life. They would live a life of prayer and worship

of God, which is basically heaven on earth. And so that developed over the centuries. But at the same time, what developed was this idea of people who live normal, simple lives, but yet live lives of holiness in an extraordinary fashion, what today we call heroic virtues. So, Around the 7th to 8th centuries at the time of Justinian, the emperor, they began to develop a sense of justice, a sense of law, and gradually this legal sense was inserted into causes of canonization. So they took on a more and more legal nature as a cause, as a juridical process for proving the holiness of an individual. So you can see that the process of canonization that we have today is not monolithic, rather it has developed over the centuries, but the idea of imitating an individual who lived a holy life,

the idea of praying for, or rather praying with that person to God, this idea of imitation and intercession existed from the very early days of the church. It is not something new. So in a certain sense, this communion of saints, It's so essential for the life of the church. And one of the basic doctrines or issues that the Protestants have had trouble with is this whole idea of intercession. Why pray to saints when you have Jesus Christ? Well, because we're family and we care and we love each other.

If I'm in trouble, I go to my family, whether it's my blood family or my extended family. And I ask them for help. I ask them for support. It's the same thing with saints. People make the mistake of praying to saints. as if they were praying to God directly. Or, hey, look, you take care of it. I know you can do it.

That's a question of correcting improper pastoral activity, the spiritual lives of the faithful. That's where priests have to intervene and teach the faithful the proper way to pray with the saints. So often I like to say, I don't pray to the saints. I ask the saints to pray with me to Christ. Amen. Father Martin's here.

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20th. God bless you. Okay, now that we have a good foundation for the history of the saints and why we need them, let's get down to the miraculous part of the show. As we've mentioned, you can't just apply for sainthood via your local dioces. There are miracles involved. And given that my application for sainthood seems to be still pending, I asked one senior to elaborate on what does it take to be a saint? That basically goes back to the principle that a cause of canonization is God speaking to the faithful, raising up these individuals. The church does nothing else but recognize what God is doing.

But because it is a process of recognition or a process of discernment on the part of the church of what God is saying to the church and not just the church but to humanity, the church requires divine approval because basically all we as human beings do is see. adhere. So even the most holy of acts may be a very selfish act. It may not be a holy act at all. An act of generosity may not necessarily be generous and holy at all. It may be very selfish.

What the miracle is is God's approval, confirmation of what the church decides or what the church discerns. So the whole process of a miracle is basically, is God giving us confirmation that what is a human judgment of the church, true, and authentic. There are basically three paths towards canonization. The first is what's called venerability, okay? And what happens is, when the church declares, yes, this person was a true martyr, or yes, this person did live a life of heroic virtue,

or yes, this person truly offered his or her life, and died a sudden death. At that moment, the person is given the title of venerable. In other words, they're given the title, venerable servant of God. A venerable servant of God who's a martyr can be beatified, declared blessed, the second step right away.

The other two categories, heroic virtue and offering of life, there must be a miracle, which then is studied after that declaration. Scripture says, only God knows what's in the hearts of man. kind. And so in a real sense, then the miracle, this miracle, this wonderful thing to behold, is basically God's confirmation of what is a human judgment on the part of the church. So therefore,

what has to be done in the case of a miracle is there must be the elimination of any possible scientific human explanation for what happened. Then you can ask the theological question, did this happen because of the direct intervention of God at the moment prayer was said for the intercession of the candidate for canonization. So in short, God confirms the miraculous workings of the saint. Monsignor goes on to say that there are two steps in regards to miracles that are required in the journey to sainthood. The first step is beatification or a declaration that the individual is among the blessed in heaven. Now this status can be obtained by having a miracle or or by being martyred for the faith.

If one is martyred, no miracle is needed because for the church, martyrdom is the ultimate Christian witness and no other act can supersede it. I found that to be particularly sobering. For all my hunger to see wounds healed and firefall from heaven and demons fleeing out of people, to die for Christ is the ultimate miracle. Wow.

For sainthood, however, even a martyr requires a miracle. For those saints who are not martyrs, A miracle is needed for beatification and another one for canonization. Here's some examples of what such miracles might look like. So for example, we had a case of someone who had a major hemorrhage in, basically it was the bush of Africa. And obviously there were no antibiotics. There was no surgery. There was no hospital.

And so the locals prayed to the individual who was considered the saint of the area. and immediately upon requesting that prayer of intercession, the hemorrhage stopped, and the person was perfectly fine. So there you have a prognosis of death because of major hemorrhage. You have no treatment or therapy. Therefore, you cannot explain the person's condition in terms of the therapy or treatment given. You have another case where someone had a major total metastasis of cancer from head to toe. as it's happened in the case of Father Damien, St. Damien of Molokai. And when the woman was told by her doctor,

basically she should start preparing her funeral because with total metastasis, she would not be able to survive. She prayed to Father Damien that very same moment, and all of her cancer disappeared instantaneously. All of this has to be verified. It has to be proven scientific evidence, with doctors' notes, with examinations, with MRIs, CAT scans, blood tests, hospital records, doctors' records.

But then comes the key to the miracle. At that moment that the change took place, did someone pray to the candidate for canonization? So you have these two realities, in other words, scientifically inexplicable, and this fact that happened at the moment of intercession or the moment of the prayer. In the case, for example, of the miracle for the canonization of Mother Teresa, we have a fellow who is rated by his doctor

to be a three or four on what they call the Glasgow scale. And that's the scale of consciousness. Right now, you and I talking at this rate, at this level, at this situation, we're at 15 on the Glasgow scale. He was at three or four, which means he was on the doorsteps of death. They take him up to the operating room to perform a shunt to relieve the pressure on his brain that was killing him. And the doctors could not operate because he had a very deformed trachea.

And so the neurosurgeons stepped out of the operating room to find an expert because the anesthesiologist would not intubate the person for fear that he would destroy the person's trachea. While the doctor, the neurosurgeon, was out of the operating room for about a half an hour. Across town, the man's wife was crying in the local parish church. And the priest of the parish asked her why she was crying, and she told him what was happening.

And he said to her, well, why don't you and I pray to Mother Teresa? And they did, and we were able to show a direct connection between the moment of this prayer and when this change in the person's condition happened. So you get all of the records of the hospital, the surgeon, and in fact it was the neurosurgeon who reported the case. And then you get the moment that everything changed

that there was this prayer of intercession and you establish a cause and effect relationship. So there is a scientific element, which is essentially there is no human scientific explanation for it happens. And then you ask, Is there a prayer of intercession at the very moment that that inexplicable fact happened? So the miracle is there in that whole complex, which fits together and cannot be separated. Okay. Let's get our true crime podcast hats on and look at the actual investigation process

and the data used by Monsignor Sarno and the Vatican Dacastri that investigates Sainthood. Every miracle has to be proven by eyewitness testimony and documentary evidence. So a case won't even be taken into consideration that does not have those two qualifications. What you have to do then is, first of all, give the evidence that you've gathered preliminarily to a doctor and say, give me the diagnosis, give me the prognosis, give me the therapy used, and can you explain cause and effect between the therapy and the person's new condition? Okay? Once that doctor says to you, I can't explain it, then you can have a process. But even though you have a process, you must have another doctor on the process in order to help you question the witnesses about the medical facts.

Because I can't do that. That's not my job. My job is a theological question of the intercession, the prayer, the servant or the blessed, etc. But it's not the medical issues. That's where a doctor has to be part of the legal process. When it goes to Rome, there is what they call the medical board, which is composed of seven doctors who are specialists in the area in which the miracle took place. And before the full medical board meets, they give the case to two doctors of the seven.

If one of the two says, I can't explain this scientifically, then you can have the full medical board meet. five out of the seven must say we can't explain this for the cause the miracle case to move forward. So there's a distinction here between what happens on the local level and what happens in Rome. So there's no judgment made in the local level, strictly speaking, except to say, I think we have a solid case. Let's collect the evidence in the trial. Noticing the legal terminology flowing here. Now, we are going to dive into a term.

term I know many of you've heard. And no, Al Pacino is not here. Let's discuss the devil's advocate. The devil's advocate was an invention of the 18th century Benedict the 14th who worked at the vicarie as what was called the promoter general of the faith, the devil's advocate. And basically his responsibility was two things. Number one, to make sure that the process was followed. and number two, to make sure that everything, all questions, all doubts, all difficulties were answered during the process by the evidence gathered. They changed the name. In Rome, he is still called the promoter of the faith.

In the diocese or local church, he's called the promoter of justice. Because what's justice? Justice is truth. And therefore, the promoter of justice on the local church, his obligation is to promote the truth. How do you promote the truth? Number one, you have to follow this process. Why? Because this process has been determined to be the best way to get to the truth. Secondly, that the process was handled in such a way that what evidence has been guaranteed, has been collected can give us a guarantee that we can reach moral certitude about the issue

or the question. The name was changed, but the office still exists. One point to keep in mind, everybody involved in the process is the devil's advocate because no one has a right to be canonized. What the church is doing is looking for the truth.

So therefore, everyone, even those who are promoting the cause, must be, if you will, devil's advocates because they must seek the truth. In other words, we are not allowed to hide even anything that's negative. So while there is specifically a devil's advocate, in Rome, everyone must have this attitude of the devil's advocate,

because no one has a right to be canonized, but everyone does have a right to the truth, and the truth is justice. Monsignor has spent his life researching these miracles, and what I deeply appreciate about him is in one of our first conversations. He said he sees a lot of stuff that is not miraculous. Like Father Martins, he shares a natural skepticism that serves him well. So I asked him point blank, does he personally believe in miracles? Had to ask, you know.

I'm a total believer, but I'm also very critical. I don't believe just anything. So we have an obligation to seek the truth for people. It's what we call achieving moral certitude in an issue. You can't have absolute certitude because only God has absolute certitude, okay? But Popeius XIV defined moral certitude as, in view of the evidence presented, it's what any rational thinking person would conclude. And there's no other possible conclusion.

That is what's required for miracles and for canonization. The moral certitude that this person was holy, that this was truly a miracle. But in the end, when it's all said and done, it's a question of faith. And if you want to go on the philosophical level, is there a God? Can God interfere in the events of human people? Does he? Those are the three basic philosophical questions that are at the basis of a miracle. Once you have those philosophical questions answered, then you can talk about whether there are miracles.

I wanted to close out by asking for Monsignor's Hall of Faith picks, his quick picks for the most interesting causes he has worked on. It was hard for him. There are just so many. Sort of like how I get when I'm staring at all the gelato flavors available to me. What is one to do? Well, here I'm on Seniors' picks. The miracle for the beatification of Mother Teresa, a woman had a tomb in the making, the size of a soccer bowl, and from three o'clock in the afternoon, where the sisters on the first anniversary of the death of Mother Teresa prayed over this woman and touched her with a miraculous metal, which was craniated at the time of the apparition

of the Blessed Mother to Bernard of Lourdes, this tomb of action, the size of a sacrible, completely disappeared, and the next day the woman went home perfectly cured. The canonization miracle for Damien of Molokai, the woman with totally metastasized cancer from head to toe. The woman for the canonization of someone, St. Mary Ann Cope of Molokai, two that I'm dealing with right now, the one, the miracle for

the beatification of Joseph Dutton, possible cure from pulmonary hypertension, which is basically depending on its cause, incurable and least on timely death. And yet she and her friends prayed to Joseph Dutton while she was undergoing the angiogram and the hypertension to disappeared, so much so that the doctor who was doing the test was convinced that the machine had broken down. And so, like a good scientist, he shut the computer down and restarted the machine and was shocked to find out that the machine was working perfectly, and he left the room that he couldn't explain what happened.

There are lots of these cases. I mean, you're dealing with different situations, different realities. There was one case of the multiplication of rice, a village that was surrounded. by a bunch of terrorists, and they cut off their food. And the rice that they had just kept on multiplying inexplicably. How do you explain that? Well, folks, that is how a Christian becomes a saint. On this show, we like to highlight the supernatural.

And for those wondering, how this connects to exorcism, well, you just haven't listened to season one, have you? Go back. Go on. Listen to episode five, what's in a name. Then come back and see why Father likes to have assistance from the saints. no matter what you think theologically. I think Monsignor has certainly given us cause for celebration.

And think about that. When the saints do go marching in, Monsignor Sarno probably will have worked on more than a few of their causes. That's all the time we have for today. We do appreciate you supporting us. Thank you again so much. The Kickstarter has been a tremendous success. And we look forward to bringing you many, many more episodes. To keep in touch with us and get some of our anointed merchandise, you can visit us at our website.

at Exorcistfiles.tv, you can also support our hopefully historic Kickstarter by clicking Exorcistfiles.tv as well. You can also email us absurd and overly specific criticisms at Exorcist Files at gmail.com. All cases in the Exorcist Files by Father Carlos Martins from his personal archives. While this episode, once again, did not have any 3D Bonarral drama, it still takes a lot of work in research. The series is hosted by myself, Brian Bethay, and my co-host, Father Martins. Today, we just want to give a huge shout-out and thank you to Monsignor, Robert Sarno.

It takes a legion of people to make this show possible, so thank you to our sound designer, editor and mixers, Dan Blessinger and Michelle Martinez, music and scoring by Jim Cavell. Research writing and script-doctering was done by Ryan Bethay, Christoph Allers, and, of course, our very own Caleb Starr. Nice work on this one.

Executive producers are Ryan Bethay and Carlos Martins. Thanks so much, folks. You know,