The following was written by Stefania Falasca in 30Days an Italian international monthly edited by Giulio Andreotti. It is a reportedly true story of a miraculous healing of Giuseppe Denora attributed to Pope John Paul I in 1992.
Giuseppe Denora, sixty year-old inhabitant of Altamura, a former bank clerk, is the beneficiary of the intercession of Pope Luciani. Sixteen years ago he was healed of a malignant stomach tumor. A sudden recovery, complete and lasting, so that his case led to the opening of an investigation into the prodigious happening that will now be studied by the Congregation for the Causes of Saints. He speaks now for the first time of what happened in 1992, only now that the enquiry set up by the diocesan ecclesiastical court of Altamura is about to officially terminate its sessions…..
“… I bought a copy of Avvenire newspaper with his photograph and took it home. I even framed it….. and put it in the bedroom….when I fell sick, I would look at him, there in front of me. But I have to be honest, I didn’t pray to him like you do to great saints. I didn’t turn to him as a great saint… No, I spoke to him man to man.
“I went to a doctor here in Altamura. He did a gastroscopy on me. He said, ‘Here, unfortunately, things are looking bad, very bad, so and see this oncologist at Bari hospital.’ The oncologist made me do another gastroscopy. Same result. ‘Non-Hodgkins’s gastric lyphoma’. I came home and started chemotherapy…. I could hardly get out of bed. I lay there, with the photo of this man in front of me. I’d look at him, I let him in on my worries and we’d talk in silence, in the way that I said: ‘Look at the state I’m in. I can’t walk anymore… What can I do?’ … At other times, ‘you know them well, those upstairs, those that are higher than you. You ask those who are higher up than you what I’m to do, if they’ll help me. If they can help me. You tell them’. On the night of 27 March I felt I was dying from the pain. A furnace in my stomach, I felt it burning so much. And I was burning inside with the pain of having to leave my family. I looked at him and said again: ‘If I have to die now who’s going to think about feeding those children….’. The room that night was lit up as always by the lampposts in the street… I saw it at the foot of the bed: a dark shadow that came forward and passed alongside me rapidly with a hand stretched out, a hand, an instant, and in that exact instant it was as if that fire I had inside was dowsed with water. I fell asleep and in the morning I woke rested, reborn…. from that moment on nothing more, I immediately felt just as I am now; in full health. That’s how it was…. seeing the results, the doctors wrote: ‘Complete Remission’…
“Listen, I don’t know, I don’t know how I snatched this favor from him. My own deserts, certainly not. Perhaps the way I asked him… I don’t know…”
As I have said several times in the past, I believe Papa Luciani is a saint. His simplicity and joy were qualities that endeared him to all of us who were able to draw near to him and serve him during those short 33 days as our Holy Father in 1978.
You may read Stefania Falasca’s entire article at: www.30giorni.it/us/articolo.asp?id=18978
