John Berchmans did a miracle
[1599-1621]
There is a shrine to John Berchmans at the Society of Sacred Heart school in Grand Coteau, a Louisiana farming town, population 1,000. Mary Wilson was a student there in 1866, 250 years after Berchmans’s death in Rome, when she became gravely ill. “At each attempt to utter a word,” she wrote in her journal, “blood would gush from my mouth.” For whatever reason, the nuns began praying to Berchmans and, according to Wilson, “incessantly placing [a card of] his dear image in my mouth.” She heard his voice and felt his finger on her tongue; suddenly the sores in her mouth were healed and all her pain was gone. Eight months later, Berchmans appeared to Mary a second time to tell her it was time to die. His shrine is in the infirmary, her grave outside its window.