Healing of Maria Emilia Santos

Recovered ability to walk during Rosary novena at a retreat for the sick at Fátima. No medical explanation found. After cure, remained at the Institute of Saint Francis as a helper of others.

Maria Emilia Santos lived at the Institute of Saint Francis in Leiria, Portugal, a care facility for people with chronic illness. By 1987 she had been paralyzed and largely confined for approximately twenty-two years following a spinal injury that had left her paraplegic. She was in her late fifties.

In the spring of 1987, Santos attended a retreat for the sick held at the Sanctuary of Fátima. On March 25, the Feast of the Annunciation, she prayed the Rosary during one of the retreat's sessions — an act of prayer directed in part toward the intercession of Blessed Francisco and Jacinta Marto, the two shepherd children of Fátima whose beatification cause was actively under investigation by the Church.

During or following that prayer, Santos recovered the use of her legs. The paralysis that had confined her for more than two decades was gone. Physicians who examined her afterward found no medical explanation for the recovery. The event was reported to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints and subjected to formal investigation.

After her cure, Santos chose to remain at the Institute of Saint Francis — not as a patient but as a helper of others suffering chronic illness. She died there in November 2000 at approximately seventy years of age, from leukemia.

The Congregation for the Causes of Saints approved her healing as the miracle required for the beatification of Francisco and Jacinta Marto. On May 13, 2000, Pope John Paul II beatified both children at the Sanctuary of Fátima, on the eighty-third anniversary of the first apparition.