As her 8-year-old son, Enzzo, played on the balcony of her apartment, Sandra Grossi de Almeida held up an X-ray picture that she said proved that his very existence was a miracle.The chemist pointed to a black wedge that she said was a wall of tissue dividing her uterus, a malformation that should have made it impossible for her to carry a baby for more than four months. Yet Enzzo grew for seven months in a space about half the size of a normal uterus until he was delivered by Caesarean section.
Grossi de Almeida attributes the miracle of her son's birth to a paper "pill" inscribed with a prayer that she ate during her pregnancy.
The Vatican agrees, pronouncing Enzzo one of the two miracles needed to declare the creator of the pills, an 18th-century Franciscan monk named Antonio de Sant'Anna Galvao, a saint.
The May 11 canonization of Galvao, Brazil's first native-born saint, will be the centerpiece event when Pope Benedict XVI visits Brazil next month.
Many say it also will be a watershed in the Roman Catholic Church's battle to fight the loss of adherents to fast-growing Pentecostal churches.
Galvao's pills reportedly have cured thousands of Brazilians of everything from depression to hepatitis. His elevation to sainthood will be long-delayed recognition of what many believe is an ongoing miracle that's saved - or bettered - lives for more than two centuries.
Galvao's pills contain this prayer: "After the birth, the Virgin remained intact / Mother of God, intercede on our behalf."
They're assembled in five locations around Sao Paulo state, including by women in Galvao's hometown of Guaratingueta, who gather every afternoon in a room above the local cathedral.
The pills also are made by cloistered nuns at the Convent of Light in Sao Paulo, where Galvao died in 1832 at age 83.
Believers swallow three seed-sized pills over nine days, during which they recite the prayer printed on the paper.
"It's a vehicle of faith," said Grossi de Almeida, who miscarried twice, including losing twins, before Enzzo was born. "You take the pills, and you believe in them, you believe they will make you better, and you become stronger in your faith. You know there's a God that helps you."
On a recent afternoon, Maria Carolina da Ressurreicao and her husband traveled hours inland to Guaratingueta from their home on the coast to pick up packets of the pills, which are free, though donations are welcome.
"We've always lived with Friar Galvao and his pills," said da Ressurreicao, who has circulatory problems and whose husband is recovering from a heart attack. "We've always asked for his help, and he's always come through."
The canonization will cap more than two decades of advocacy by nun Celia Cadorin and other Brazilian church officials who've trumpeted Galvao's story.
The church requires saints to have performed two miracles, and the process of proving them, always after the saint's death, can take centuries. Special cases, such as the ongoing beatification of Pope John Paul II, can be expedited.
The Vatican confirmed the monk's first miracle in 1998, the case of 4-year-old Daniela Cristina da Silva, who reportedly was cured of crippling hepatitis in 1990 after eating one of the monk's pills.
The monk's second proven miracle - Grossi de Almeida's successful pregnancy - was declared last December, clearing his path to sainthood.
Cadorin said she picked the two cases out of nearly 24,000 miracles attributed to the monk because they were the best documented and most inexplicable.
"It was a very scientific process," Cadorin said. "We had to interview witnesses, talk to doctors and scientists, and document everything. You have to really prove that, scientifically, the events were impossible."
The church sent Grossi de Almeida to have sonographic images made of her uterus to confirm that it was divided in half. Shown an X-ray image of the uterus by a McClatchy reporter, a Brazilian obstetrician confirmed that the 37-year-old would have been unable to carry a fetus past the fourth month of pregnancy.
Cadorin sent Da Silva for tests of her blood, urine and feces as well as sonographic imaging to confirm that she'd recovered from advanced hepatitis A.
"There was no medical cure for Daniela in her condition," said the girl's mother, Jacira Francisco, who was interviewed at the Convent of Light, which Galvao designed and helped build. "She shouldn't have recovered the way she did."
Skeptics of religion, however, have questioned the process's science.
"Every time someone gets healed and they don't know why, they say it must be God," said Daniel Sottomaior, the vice president of the Round Earth Society, a group of Brazilian scholars who cast a skeptical eye on such phenomena.
"They change the name from ignorance to God. Why not say it was the big alien or the unicorn or the leprechaun?"
Galvao's pills also have had their detractors within the church.
Aloisio Lorscheider, an outspoken former archbishop of Aparecida, a neighboring city to Guaratingueta, called the pill's use "superstition" and prohibited the region's nuns from producing them. The nuns continued to make the pills despite the order.
"I consider it even ridiculous that, in the evolved and progressive days in which we live, there are still people who pursue this," Lorscheider said in a 1998 interview with the newspaper Vale do Paraiba.
Lorscheider, now 82, retired in 2004 in poor health, and efforts to interview him were unsuccessful.
Galvao's story, at least as told by church lore, is full of scientifically inexplicable events.
The monk started the tradition of the pills in the late 18th century when he wrote his famous prayer on three pieces of paper in Sao Paulo and asked a woman who was having a difficult pregnancy to eat them. She reportedly went on to give birth to a healthy child. Demand for the pills surged.
The monk's devotees believe that his miraculous powers didn't stop there. They say he levitated while praying, was able to appear in two places at once, could read minds and could witness events where he wasn't physically present.
For more than 150 years, women around Guaratingueta have passed around a worn-out rope that's believed to have been the monk's belt, tying it around their waists during childbirth for good luck.
People also have chipped off pieces of marble from the walls of the Convent of Light and steeped them in water, which they've drunk like tea.
"This whole emphasis on magic and practical remedies for everyday problems is a very Brazilian approach to religion," popular religions expert Lisias Nogueira Negrao said.
"In a country where a great part of people live in poverty, they look for this dimension of magic that can help them just survive. They're less worried about big issues such as morality."
The main question for many Catholics is whether the canonization can revive a church that's lost millions of people to the country's growing Pentecostal congregations.
While 125 million Brazilians identified themselves as Catholic in a 2000 census, Brazil became the world's biggest Pentecostal country last year.
The monk's boosters said they were confident that his canonization would reverse that trend.
"Today, with a Brazilian saint and the pope coming, it's a new life for the Catholic Church," said Tom Maia, a distant nephew of the monk who's opened two museums about him in Guaratingueta and been a leading advocate for his canonization.
"What's happened over the years is with our numeric strength, we Catholics have become too comfortable and we've lost people. But the Brazilian church is waking up."
Nogueira Negrao, however, said he doubted that the canonization would end the church's slide.
"The Catholic Church in Brazil developed very independently, without the presence of the institutions," he said. "There are parts of Brazil where a priest comes by once a year, so people have developed their own way of worshiping."
Nonetheless, devotion to Galvao is surging before the pope's visit, and tens of thousands of his pills are being hand-made and distributed every day.
At the Convent of Light, dozens of faithful show up every day seeking divine help.
"Sometimes, they've been all we've had when there wasn't any money for medicines," said Maria Cicera da Silva, 54, who was picking up pills for a cousin. "Faith can do a lot, and I have a lot of faith."
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