Healing of Lucas Rodrigues Magalhães Mata

Fell 6.5m from window on March 3, 2013. Prognosis: vegetative state or death. Carmelite sisters at Campo Mourão prayed at relics of Francisco and Jacinta on March 7. Woke up March 9, spoke, asked for sister. Discharged from ICU March 11; released from hospital March 15. Full recovery, unchanged intelligence and personality.

On March 3, 2013, at 8 p.m., five-year-old Lucas Rodrigues Magalhães Mata fell from a window of his home in Juranda, in the state of Paraná, Brazil, dropping approximately 6.5 meters to the ground. His head struck the earth directly. He was taken unconscious to the Hospital of Campo Mourão. Within hours he was in a deep coma. During the night his heart stopped twice. Emergency surgery was performed.

Over the following days, attending physicians — including some who were not religious — assessed his condition as nearly hopeless. On March 6, they told Lucas's parents, João Batista and Lucila Yurie, that his chances of survival were very low, and that if he survived he would almost certainly face severe cognitive disabilities or a permanent vegetative state. The cause of the bleak prognosis was the brain tissue loss sustained in the fall.

On March 7, a sister at the Carmelite convent in Campo Mourão received word of the child's condition. She went immediately to the relics of Blessed Francisco and Jacinta Marto kept at the convent and prayed aloud: "Shepherds, save this child, who is a child like you." She gathered the other sisters and they prayed together.

Two days later, on March 9, Lucas woke up. He began to speak. He asked for his little sister. By March 11 he had been discharged from the intensive care unit. On March 15 he was released from the hospital entirely. Physicians who examined him found his intelligence, personality, and function unchanged from before the accident. The men and women who had forecast vegetative disability described his recovery as inexplicable.

Pope Francis approved the miracle in January 2017. On May 13, 2017, the centenary of the first apparition at Fátima, he canonized Francisco and Jacinta Marto at the sanctuary — the site where, one hundred years earlier, they had knelt before the Lady in the Cova da Iria.