Healing of Angela Testoni

Angela Testoni was cured of advanced intestinal tuberculosis in July 1948 after praying for Maximilian Kolbe's intercession. Her physicians could not explain the resolution of the condition. The cure was accepted as one of two miracles for his beatification.

Angela Testoni was an Italian woman suffering from advanced intestinal tuberculosis — a disease which, in the late 1940s before effective antibiotic therapy was widely available, was frequently fatal once it reached the terminal stage. Her condition was considered beyond the reach of medicine.

Maximilian Kolbe had been dead for seven years. He had died at Auschwitz on August 14, 1941, and word of his sacrifice — volunteering to take the place of a condemned man he did not know — had spread widely among Polish and Italian Catholics in the years following the war. His cause for beatification had been opened, and his intercession was being sought by many.

Angela Testoni prayed for his intercession. In July 1948, her condition resolved in a manner her physicians could not explain. The tuberculosis cleared completely. The Congregation for the Causes of Saints reviewed the case during the investigation into Kolbe's beatification cause. Medical experts examining the documentation declared the healing scientifically inexplicable. It was accepted as one of two miracles supporting Kolbe's beatification.

Maximilian Kolbe was beatified by Pope Paul VI on October 17, 1971. He was initially beatified as a confessor of the faith — a classification Pope John Paul II overturned eleven years later when, at the canonization in 1982, he declared Kolbe a martyr of charity, the first person to be so designated in the modern canonization process.