Maria Esposito was ready to give up. Wasted away at 42 kilos (92
pounds), she couldn't bear another dose of chemotherapy to fight the
Stage IV Burkitt's lymphoma that had invaded her body while she was
pregnant with her second child.
But as she and her family had done
since she was diagnosed with the rare and aggressive form of cancer in
July 2005, Esposito prayed to the man who had appeared to her husband in
a dream as the only person who could save her: Pope Pius XII.
Esposito
survived, cured after a single, six-week cycle of chemotherapy — a
recovery that, she says, stunned her doctors and convinced her that the
World War II-era pope had intervened with God to save her.
Esposito's
case, which the 42-year-old teacher recounted to The Associated Press
in her first media interview, has been proposed to the Vatican as the
possible miracle needed to beatify Pius, one of the most controversial
sainthood causes under way, given that many Jews say he failed to speak
out enough to stop the Holocaust.
Pius' main biographer, American
Sister Margherita Marchione, has championed Esposito's miracle case and
personally presented it to the Vatican's No. 2 official, Cardinal
Tarcisio Bertone.
Pope Benedict XVI moved Pius one step closer to
possible sainthood in December 2009 when he confirmed that Pius lived a
life of "heroic" Christian virtue. All that is needed now is for the
Vatican to determine a "miracle" occurred.
"I'm certain that
inside of me there was the hand of God operating, thanks to the
intercession of Pope Pius XII," Esposito said during a recent interview
in her cheery dining room in the seaside town of Castellammare di Stabia
on the Amalfi coast. "I'm convinced of it."
Doctors and church officials aren't so sure.
Esposito's
local bishop, Monsignor Felice Cece, summoned Esposito earlier this
year to testify about her recovery to determine if indeed it was
medically inexplicable, one of the key thresholds required by the
Vatican to determine if a miracle occurred.
After consulting two
outside doctors, Cece determined that Esposito could have been cured by
even a single cycle of chemo and essentially closed the case.
But
Esposito's supporters, led by Marchione, have gone over the bishop's
head and are sending her full medical file directly to the Vatican's
saint-making office for review.
"I was saved. I thank the Lord," said Esposito. "If he did something for me, then I now want to do something for him."
The
Rev. Peter Gumpel, the Jesuit historian who has spearheaded Pius'
saint-making cause for some two decades, said the case was under
consideration but was noncommittal.
"We are at the very first
preliminary stages of pre-investigation, and we are not even sure
whether it will go ahead," he said, stressing that regardless the
process is still years away from fruition.
The Vatican's saint-making process has long been subject to skeptics' doubts.
Some
question, for example, whether the original diagnosis was correct for
the French nun whose inexplicable cure of Parkinson's disease paved the
way for Pope John Paul II's beatification.
Others have questioned
whether the Jewish convert Edith Stein should have been canonized based
on the survival of a 2-year-old girl who overdosed on Tylenol.
As
such, the questions surrounding Pius' possible miracle are just further
evidence of the obstacles and deep theological, historical and political
divisions that his cause has run into ever since it was launched in
1965.
Pius was pope in 1939-1958. Before his election he served as
the Vatican's No. 2 and before that as papal nuncio to Germany. Given
his deep involvement in the Vatican's diplomatic affairs with the Nazis,
what Pius did or didn't do during the war has become the single most
divisive issue in the Vatican's relations with Jews.
More
recently, his beatification case has become the symbolic battleground in
the debate over the future of the Catholic Church. Progressives are
opposed to it because to them, Pius represents the church before the
modernizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council.
Traditionalists and
conservatives are in favor of it for precisely the same reasons.
The
Vatican insists Pius used quiet diplomacy to save Jewish lives and that
speaking out more forcefully against the Nazis would have resulted in
more deaths. Critics argue he could have and should have said and done
more.
"To talk about the pope as anything other than a moral
coward as far as the murder of Jews of Rome is concerned is difficult
for any of us who study what actually happened to take," said Brown
University anthropologist and historian David Kertzer, author of a
forthcoming book on Pius' predecessor, Pope Pius XI.
Despite
opposition, Pius' cause is progressing at an impressive clip amid an
increasingly concerted effort by Benedict and Pius' supporters to
highlight his virtues and discredit his naysayers.
A museum is planned
in his honor, as are conferences and exhibits.
The Vatican's
newspaper, Pius' chief cheerleader, recently ran an article about how
Pius had Jews sheltered in convents around Rome during the Nazi
occupation.
A Vatican-sponsored film festival in May screened three
glowing films about his papacy.
Benedict himself recently extolled Pius
as a hero during the war, saying he'd earned the "everlasting gratitude"
of its victims.
Jewish groups and historians have argued for
years that the Vatican had no business moving forward with Pius'
beatification cause until the Vatican's full secret archive of his
papacy is opened to scholars for independent research.
That process is
expected to take several more years.
"My position has always been
to say — and I've said it to Pope Benedict XVI — that this is a matter
that should be deferred until at least the generation of Holocaust
survivors is no longer with us, so it's not as if rubbing the salt into
their wounds," said Rabbi David Rosen, head of interfaith relations at
the American Jewish Committee.
Last year, 19 Catholic scholars
appealed to the academic in Benedict to give researchers more time to
study the full archives.
"The question isn't 'Did he do anything?' but
whether he might have done more or sooner," said the Rev. John
Pawlikowski, ethics professor at the Catholic Theologcial Union who
co-wrote the letter.
Pius' supporters, however, are getting
impatient.
They charge that few scholars ever consult the 11 volumes of
World War II archives that have already been released and put online,
along with thousands of other documents, by a foundation headed by a
Long Island Jew who admires Pius.
"It annoys me terribly that such
an injustice is being done to such a great man, that he should be
treated the way he is," said Marchione, the Pius biographer who is
promoting Esposito's miracle case.
Sitting in her order's convent a
stone's throw from the Vatican, Marchione said her religious
congregation alone, on orders from Pius, sheltered 114 Jewish women at
three separate convents during the Nazi occupation.
"I'm just
tired of the whole thing that people can't go back to the documents that
prove it and accept it as historical truth," she said in a recent
interview.
Marchione flips through one of her nine books on Pius
to prove her point: a photo of Jewish women and children sheltered in
the papal summer residence at Castel Gandolfo; a photo of a pro-pope
rally after Rome was liberated in 1944; a shot of the pope with members
of the Israeli Philharmonic who in 1955 performed a concert for Pius in
the Vatican in gratitude for having saved Jews.
Marchione has been
unflagging in her support for Esposito's case, presenting it first to
Bertone, the Vatican's secretary of state, in 2009 and recently sending
her secretary to Castellammare di Stabia to gather Esposito's testimony
and medical file to send directly to the Vatican's saint-making office.
For
Pius' supporters, the hunt for a miracle is all the more urgent because
he isn't a household name like Mother Teresa or Pope John Paul II.
Where he is known, it's most often in the context of his controversial
record, not necessarily because people would think to pray to him for a
medical cure.
Esposito, in fact, said she had never heard of Pius until she fell ill.
Her
husband, Umberto di Maio, said the family had been praying to John Paul
II, who had died just a few months before, when Esposito was diagnosed
in July 2005.
But as di Maio recounts it, John Paul appeared to him in a
dream one night and said he couldn't help Esposito but showed a photo
of a slim, bespecled prelate who could.
Di Maio said he wasn't
able to identify the priest until he saw Pius on the cover of a Catholic
magazine a week later. As soon as he did, the family began fervently
praying to Pius.
The family became convinced of Pius' intervention
when Esposito's case was referred to a cancer specialist in Rome, an
atheist who, after reviewing her charts, asked the family if they
believed in God.
When di Maio replied they did, the doctor said: "Then pray, because she needs it," di Maio recounted.
Esposito,
who still keeps the same dog-eared photocopy of Pius in her book of
prayers, says she and her doctors were stunned when her PET scan, which
detects lingering traces of cancer, came out clean after her six-week
chemo cycle at the Umberto I hospital in the southern city of Nocera,
near Salerno.
Her doctor, she said, was flabbergasted: "'Do you
see this? It's clean! How is it possible?'" Esposito recalled Dr.
Alfonso Maria D'Arco, head of oncology and hematology at Umberto I, as
saying.
"And spontaneously I said to him, 'Doctor, doctor, isn't it possible that it came from above?" she said, pointing heavenward.
"No, no, no. Don't say shocking things," she said he responded.
"But
for me it was a miracle, because it wasn't possible," she said,
fighting back tears. "It wasn't possible. Not even they believed it in
that moment."
D'Arco didn't respond to email requests for comment and couldn't be reached by telephone.
Dr.
Ann S. LaCasce, an assistant professor of medicine at the Harvard
Medical School's lymphoma program and affiliated Dana Farber Cancer
Institute, said Esposito's speedy recovery wasn't all that remarkable.
"Not
surprising at all," LaCasce said after reviewing the protocol Esposito
received.
"The key is this aggressive, multi-agent chemotherapy regimen
that she got. It doesn't sound like a miracle at all. She did great, as
expected."
LaCasce, who said she treats four to five cases of
Burkitt's a year, said the prognosis for the rare subtype of non-Hodgkin
lymphoma is usually very good, particularly for children and young
adults who can tolerate the high toxicity that the aggressive chemo
entails.
"Burkitt's is a disease we like to treat because they do
really well, they feel better so quickly," LaCasce said.
"She was cured
of her disease with the appropriate chemotherapy."
Esposito and
her supporters, however, are undeterred.
Just last week, she traveled to
Rome to take part in a ceremony outside St. Peter's Square marking the
anniversary of the day the city of Rome dedicated a piazza to Pius to
thank him for having defended Rome from the Nazis.
Esposito says she wants people to know Pius not just for what he did for Rome but for her.
"I
am here. I want to say I'm alive. I know what I went through and I
assure you, it was really serious, something awful. Death was very
close. And I am here."