Video-Non-survivable Ohio shooting victim believed healed through intercession of late Pope John Paul II

The "miraculous" recovery of Jory Aebly, 26-who suffered a "non-survivable" gunshot to the head during a mugging in Cleveland- has been attributed to the intercession of Pope John Paul II. Doctors at the Metro Health Medical Center declared it to be a "non-survivable" injury, ABC’s Good Morning America reports.
According to CNA

Hospital chaplain Fr. Art Snedeker administered Aebly with the Sacrament of the Sick, asking Pope John Paul II to pray for Jory and to protect him.

Fr. Snedeker explained that the Pope had promised him he would always pray for the patients at the hospital and blessed a dozen rosaries with special patients at the hospital.

The priest gave Aebly the last of the rosaries that had been blessed by the Pope, after which Aebly consistently improved.....Dr. Robert Geertman, a neurosurgeon involved in Aebly's treatment, told Good Morning America his patient’s survival was "one in a million."

Two other miracles are attributed to the intercession of Pope John Paul II

• In March 2007, a French nun, Sister Marie-Simon-Pierre, said she had been cured of Parkinson's disease after praying to John Paul.
• AOL News reports that John Paul may have cured a 9-year-old Polish boy who had been unable to walk, said Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, the personal secretary of the late pontiff.
  Dziwisz -- who now heads John Paul’s old diocese of Krakow, Poland -- said the boy had been unable to walk because of a kidney ailment. But a few days ago, the youngster's parents brought him to John Paul's tomb in the grottoes of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome.
  "He was brought in a wheelchair because he wasn't able to walk," Dziwisz said. After praying at the tomb, the cardinal said, the boy told his parents "'I want to walk.' He got up and started walking, healthy."

Pope John Paul appears well on the way to canonization. One miracle is required for beatification and a second for canonization. Church officials are investigating all three occurrences. The certification of two miracles would ensure canonization.

Cuba:Fidel Castro hints that he will die soon-Could he die a Catholic?

Fidel Castro doesn't expect to be alive to witness the end of Obama's first term in office, says an article, written by the former Cuban president on an official government website."I have had the rare privilege of observing events over a long period of time. I get information and meditate carefully over these events. I don't expect to enjoy this privilege in four years, when Obama's first term in office concludes," Castro wrote.

The seven-paragraph essay discusses the inauguration and coming term of U.S. President Barack Obama, a topic he also addressed in an article published Wednesday. In Thursday's essay, Castro says that Obama "has transformed himself under the inspiration of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. to the point of becoming a living symbol of the American dream." "But despite noble intentions, there are still many questions to answer," Castro added, specifically pointing out the question of whether a capitalist system can protect the environment. (Sofia News Agency)

Presumably as a Communist Castro does not believe in a God or an after life. However in recent times there have been indications that this might be about to change.Restrictions on the Catholic religion have been eased. After Pope John Paul II's death in April 2005, Castro attended a Mass in his honour in Havana's cathedral and signed the Papal condolence book at the Vatican Embassy. As death approaches there appears to be an evolution in his thinking.
Perhaps Castro will abjure atheism and die a Catholic.

Alive -Illusion choking life out of Catholic Church in US

This is the text of a powerful article in Alive an Irish Catholic Monthly. This newspaper is free to 350,000 homes nationwide.

If US Catholics don’t confront the fact that “we are in desperate trouble” it could lead to the collapse of the Catholic Church in America, a leading commentator has warned. Russell Shaw, a former spokesman for the US bishops, rejected the view that “we’re doing okay”, describing it as the “happy-talk version of American Catholicism” and as “a central element of the liberal Catholic line".


Against this view he gave a list of statistics which suggested how great the crisis is. Only 30% now attend Sunday Mass, and Catholic marriages are down from 426,000 in 1970 to 200,000 last year. “Hundreds of thousands of American Catholics who marry each year don’t bother having their marriages blessed by the Church,” he wrote. “It is safe to suppose that most no longer practise the faith. I hardly need tell you what that means for the religious upbringing of their kids.” A survey in 2005 found that 75% of US Catholics said good Catholics need not observe the Church’s teaching on contraception; two-thirds said the same about the teaching on divorce and remarriage while nearly one in four held that a Catholic need not believe that Jesus rose bodily from the dead. In a 2003 survey of Catholics 86% agreed with the statement “If you believe in God, it doesn’t really matter which religion you belong to,” while “74% said yes to ‘The major world religions are equally good ways of finding ultimate truth’.” Writing in Catholic World Report, Mr Shaw, author of 20 books, called for honesty and candour in facing the crisis. “To begin with, our bishops need to face the fact that very many Catholics have lost confidence in them as a group,” he wrote.


“People just aren’t paying attention any more. If Catholic university presidents and pro-abortion Catholic politicians can get away with ignoring the representatives of the magisterium, why not ordinary folks?” Lay men and women must find their proper roles in the apostolate of the Church, as set out by Pope John Paul II in Christifideles Laici, and that does not mean becoming part of a neo-clericalism. “There is a desperate need for moral straight talk, too,” wrote Shaw. “Telling people who rarely or never go to Mass and take for granted their right to dissent that they’re good Catholics does a vast amount of harm.” A priest “who was brave enough to preach against contraception” reported afterwards, “the women got upset and the men got mad.” But the effort to communicate the Church’s teaching has to be made, he said. The commentator believed that “the healthiest development in American Catholicism in a long time was the action of a courageous bishop in Worcester, Massachusetts.”


He told Holy Cross College “it couldn’t go on claiming to be Catholic” if it persisted in acting contrary to Church teaching. Hoping Pope Benedict will address the issues during his brief visit to the US this month, Mr Shaw remarked, “today illusion—the illusion that we aren’t doing so bad—is choking the life out of the Catholic Church in the United States.”