Page 137 - FLIPBOOK - Life of Saint Gerard Majella - Vassall-Phillips

LIFE OF SAINT GERARD MAJELLA

had been a gaping wound, hideous to behold.
The year after this miracle, Ursula Solito was attacked by a
frightful cancer, and given up by the doctors, who advised her to
receive the Last Sacraments. A picture of the holy Brother was
shortly afterwards placed upon her head, and the attendants prayed
to him with much fervour. In a few moments she complained that
she had received a blow in the front of the cancer, and that she was
suffering acute pains. Soon, however, she fell asleep. On awakening
she found the doctors round her bed. They examined her with
amazement. She was perfectly cured.
“Oh,” she said to them, “it is not you who have cured me, it is
Brother Gerard!”
In the year 1867 Laurence Riola, a boy ten years of age, was given
over by the most distinguished physicians of Naples. The child then
begged Brother Gerard to cure him. He fell asleep, and dreamed that
he saw a golden ladder resting on his head and reaching up to
Heaven. He saw the holy Brother coming down this ladder with a
crucifix on his left arm. He touched the child, who at once woke up
to find himself quite well again.
Saint Alphonsus, on his bed of death, had pressed to his lips the
picture of Saint Gerard. The Holy Founder had wished himself to
introduce the cause of the Beatification at Rome. This, however, was,
for a variety of reasons, impossible.
It was not until the year 1843 that sixty witnesses were examined
on oath at Muro, the place of his birth, and ninety-four at Caposele,
where he had died, concerning the virtues and miracles of Brother
Gerard Majella. This sworn testimony was sent to Rome, and in the
September of 1847, Pope Pius IX, of glorious memory, at the prayer
of the King of Naples, of forty-seven Archbishops and Bishops of
that Kingdom, and of many other persons of distinction, signed the
decree by which his case was formally brought before the Apostolic
See.
Thirty years later, in the presence of a large number of Bishops,
who had come to the Holy City to celebrate his Episcopal Jubilee, the
Sovereign Pontiff solemnly declared that this Venerable Servant of
God had practised the Christian Virtues in a heroic degree.
Pius IX went to his everlasting reward the following year. It was
reserved for his successor, the great Leo XIII, to inscribe Gerard's
name in the white roll of the Beatified.

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