The authentication process—opaque and byzantine, but also forensically rigorous—has changed only around the edges since 1588, when Pope Sixtus V centralized and formalized a practice that for centuries had been the function of local bishops and rectors. Because these bishops were often political appointees, this vox populi method of authenticating miracles—and thereby helping to confer sainthood on those deemed responsible—was prone to looseness at best and corruption at worst, and as such was among the many grievances lodged by reformers during the Protestant Schism. Sixtus V established a new body, nowadays called the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, for regulating, among other matters, what is and isn’t a miracle. Essential to this body’s deliberations was the advocatus diaboli, or devil’s advocate, a canon lawyer whose role was to argue against the canonization of sainthood candidates, often by debunking the miracles attributed to them. The job, in effect, was to be the in-house rationalist, to conduct one’s duties with a perpetually raised eyebrow.
This is not exactly the role Euclide Abbascia sees for himself—and it’s worth noting that Pope John Paul II effectively abolished the role of the advocatus diaboli in 1983—but he is nonetheless an heir to its prosecutorial skepticism.
Most alleged miracles, he says, fail an initial sniff test. He cites the Cambridge mathematician John Edensor Littlewood’s theorem that human events with million-to-one odds are more commonplace than they might otherwise seem, when you factor in a sample size of seven billion people—that is to say, given truly large numbers, the improbable inexorably fades into the probable. Things that can happen, but almost never do, do not constitute miracles. Abbascia points to the survival of one of the victims of the 2012 mass shooting in an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater, that of a twenty-two-year-old woman who was shot in the face: A shotgun pellet entered her nose but traveled through an unusual seam of fluid in her brain cavity, never farther or much closer than a millimeter from the brain’s vital areas. An extreme outlier, in statistical-probability terms: yes. An example of prevenient grace, perhaps. But not a miracle. Bending the laws of probability is not the same as bending those of nature.
Parsing these distinctions, and hundreds of others, has been Abbascia’s occupation for almost a decade. His older brother, Matteo, is a member of the European Parliament whose name is frequently bandied as a potential candidate for Rome’s mayoralty, and Euclide once seemed poised for a similar political destiny. The Abbascia family has been part of Rome’s elite since the Renaissance; when Euclide was baptized, at the Basilica of Saint Vitale, then–prime minister Emilio Colombo was among those in attendance. He followed his brother to the University of Milan before peeling off to earn a degree in civil law from Pontifical Lateran University, which operates under the Pope’s direct authority. “I don’t think Euclide,” his brother jokes, “ever quite got over the thrill of being an altar boy.”
As a young prosecutor in Rome, in the 1990s, Euclide gained mixed renown for his role in convicting a serial killer named Donato Padovano. Mixed, because Padovano—nicknamed “Il Vigilante” by some papers and “Il Mostro Buono” (“the Good Monster”) by others—located his eight victims on internet chat rooms for pedophiles, luring them to their deaths with false promises of a rendezvous with a six-year-old girl and/or boy. These were grisly deaths, preceded by torture and for six victims by castration, but, once the pattern became clear, they roused little pity or terror in Rome. An editorial in the daily newspaper Il Tempo even suggested police turn a blind eye to the killings, likening the still-at-large killer to a gardener pulling weeds. When Padovano was finally arrested, in 1999, a small crowd gathered outside Rebibbia prison in support, many leaving flowers and wreaths, which the police were quick to cart away.
For Euclide Abbascia, the multiyear trial proved a crisis point—the nadir, or final gasp, of an enervating career in the law. It wasn’t that he felt the moral ambivalence of Il Tempo’s editorialist and much of Rome’s citizenry, even after it emerged that one of Padovano’s victims had repeatedly and brutally molested his nieces years earlier. (At sentencing, two of these nieces pleaded for leniency for their uncle’s murderer.) No, Padovano was indeed a mostro, and not a good one: He later confessed to the murders of two prostitutes predating his pedophile spree, before he found a way to morally rationalize the pleasure he derived from slow and vicious killing. As the trial trudged forward, in the plodding way of the Italian judiciary, Euclide Abbascia felt himself increasingly unmoored, cast adrift on a sludgy, toxic sea. He deplored the victims as much as their murderer but most of all deplored the hours they all spent crowding his head; his job, he felt, was merely to punctuate a sentence he wished he’d never read.
“From my earliest childhood,” he says, “it was always my goal to live in a state of astonishment. But this was the wrong kind of astonishment. This was astonishment at humanity’s capacity for evil, for depravity, for greed, for apathy. It was too much for me. I wanted to be amazed by something greater.”
So he quit. After spending two years nurturing his photography skills, Euclide Abbascia took an unpaid internship at the Vatican’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints, working in the office of the Promoter of the Faith (formerly the Devil’s Advocate). There he used his legal chops to pick apart sainthood causes, scouring the biographies of sainthood candidates the way political campaigns conduct opposition research—poking the lives for weak spots, for exaggerations, for buried scandals, for anything that might disqualify a candidate from the church’s most sacred honor. That his labors were mostly futile supplied him with immense joy. Crowding his head now, and suffusing him with clean amazement, were people of extraordinary virtue and sacrifice, acts of profound empathy, and, above all, the astonishments of the miracles under his review.
Toward the end of his three-year internship, in 2005, he started working part-time for Dr. Antonio Liuni, a private canon lawyer in Rome who specializes in propelling and litigating sainthood causes before the Congregation. Dr. Liuni, who is seventy-eight, had by then grown too old for the global travel that investigations demand; while still a vaunted lay-figure in Vatican circles, esteemed for his granular mastery of canon law and theology, arthritis plus hearing loss had eroded his ability for investigative grunt work. After concluding his Vatican internship, Euclide Abbascia stepped in full-time, making the final step on his journey from mostros to miracles.
There is a financial aspect to this work, of course, which is what leads us to Euclide Abbascia’s apartment near Logan Circle in Washington and then, by degrees, to Biloxi, Mississippi, and Cameron Harris. Though one can look upon the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica from the window of Dr. Liuni’s office on Via della Stazione di San Pietro, Dr. Liuni has no official connection to the Roman Curia; he is in private practice. The Vatican is not even his client. Instead, the sainthood candidates themselves are. He argues their cases before the Congregation, submitting evidence tying them to good deeds and miracles not unlike a prosecutor ties a defendant to misdeeds. Yet Dr. Liuni’s clients are all dead—some of them for centuries. Naturally this makes it difficult to bill them for services rendered.
So paying Dr. Liuni’s fees—as well as Euclide Abbascia’s expenses, plus the fees and/or expenses of medical experts, consultants, transcribers, translators (the Vatican accepts documentation only in Latin), fund-raisers, printers, and more—falls to donors. The cost for a canonization drive, at present, is on par with that of a minor political campaign: about one million dollars, according to most estimates. But the parallels don’t stop there. Supporters of a sainthood cause appeal to wealthy donors just as political candidates do. (These large donors tend to come from the diocese where the saint-candidate was born or lived; a local saint, like a professional sports team, is apparently a boon to civic pride.) Smaller donations are solicited via websites, some more slick than others, invariably featuring a DONATE NOW button: five dollars here, twenty dollars there. Some canonization campaigns have lately take
n to using the website gofundme.com, rewarding various donation tiers with books and biographical DVDs about the candidate.
These websites also frequently solicit reports of miracles. (To qualify for canonization, as Father Ace explained to Cameron and Tanya, a proposed saint—unless martyred—must have instrumented at least two authenticated miracles.) The website for the cause of Father Augustus Tolton (1854–97), for example, includes this appeal: “To report any spiritual or physical favors granted through prayer in Father Tolton’s name, please write to…”
Dr. Liuni is one of those on the receiving end of such reports; and when the evidence seems credible, and the funding is solidly in place, he dispatches Euclide Abbascia. Though Abbascia is reluctant to admit it, that funding component is the reason he spends so much time in the United States—so much time, in fact, that it made sense for him to lease his Logan Circle apartment in 2010. The United States has produced only eleven saints in its history, and just two of them native-born, yet it currently fields an abundance of proposed saints, in various phases of progress, with actively financed causes—fifty-four of them. Why? One might argue that with the country’s vast Catholic population (seventy million, at last count), the presence of more than eleven saints bears a certain mathematical logic—a nod to John Edensor Littlewood’s theory of large numbers. One could also argue, however (and Father Ace, whose native Nigeria has yet to see a saint canonized, does indeed make this argument), that the United States’s wealth—not its Catholic population, not its miracle-spangled history, not its spiritual timbre—is the real fuel for these campaigns. “When a miracle happens in rural Nigeria, who hears about it?” he asks. “Who pays to have it documented? Who gets on an airplane and brings the case to Rome? These things, they cost money.” (It’s important to note that hiring an advocate like Dr. Liuni, as with hiring any lawyer, is no guarantee of success. Some of Dr. Liuni’s causes—including well-financed American causes—have been languishing for more than forty years.)
Supporters of Archbishop Nicholas Fahey’s cause for sainthood—one supporter in particular—wire-transferred the funds that brought Euclide Abbascia to Mississippi. Fahey was beatified by Pope Benedict XVI in 2006, beatification being the penultimate step on canonization’s long stairwell, after the Vatican awarded him credit for the spontaneous restoration of vision in an Indiana boy who’d gone blind from macular degeneration. That left Fahey one miracle shy of sainthood.
Fahey’s cause has been in Dr. Liuni’s hands for more than twenty years, which is not unusual, but, unlike most other causes, it has a principal backer: a sixty-nine-year-old Detroit trucking magnate named Norton Skag. According to the foreword he wrote for a booklet promoting Fahey’s cause, Skag was a reckless and self-absorbed twenty-seven-year-old when, in 1974, Reverend Fahey came crashing into his life. At the time Skag was married and working for his father, who started Freight Connections Trucking with a single used panel truck. But Skag had an ungovernable wild streak that often brought him, as in this case, to the brink of self-destruction. Following what Skag has obliquely called “a night of sin,” in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, he found himself driving through the dark in a remotely wooded area where he was able to tune just a single station on his car’s radio: an AM station broadcasting one of Reverend Fahey’s sermons. For more than an hour Skag found himself captivated by Fahey’s voice and message. Then Skag’s car brushed a guardrail and flipped and kept flipping. Skag, who was unbelted, seemed to float around the car’s interior, he wrote, “like an astronaut in zero gravity,” before losing consciousness. What woke him was the sound of state troopers assessing the wreckage with what sounded like black laughter—the car was so gruesomely mangled as to be comical, a riddle of twisted steel. Yet the radio was still playing—Reverend Fahey’s voice a bit softer, and fringed with static—and Norton Skag, while bruised and bloodied, climbed from the car himself. “The Reverend Fahey’s voice, and me, were the only two things that survived that crash,” Skag wrote, “and that served to join us forever after.” What walked away from the wreckage, he continued, was “a new man.”
That new man built his father’s company, now called FreightConnex, into the fifth-largest trucking company in the United States, with annual revenue of more than ten billion dollars. All credit for this success—and more importantly for the Augustinian turnaround Skag made in his personal and spiritual life—Skag attributes to the guidance and guardianship of Reverend Fahey. For anyone who’s ever found himself or herself on the interstate behind a FreightConnex truck wondering about the quotation painted onto the rear of every trailer, “Faith is to living as headlights are to driving”—that’s a line of Fahey’s. Skag struck up a correspondence with Fahey, and after Fahey’s death, in 1980, Skag petitioned the church to open an official cause for sainthood, seeded the money for the Archbishop Nicholas Fahey Foundation, and eventually retained the services of Dr. Liuni.
Dealing with Norton Skag isn’t like dealing with the guilds of nuns and monsignors to which Dr. Liuni has been long accustomed; it’s more like manning the crow’s nest for Captain Ahab. Skag is hard-nosed, implacable, indifferent to the ancient delicacies of Vatican protocol, and most of all impatient. He badly wants to see Fahey canonized before he dies, to fully liquidate the debt he feels he owes.
Hence Skag’s middle-of-the-night phone call to Rome after he’d come across a news report about Cameron’s recovery and its possible connection to Fahey. Dr. Liuni drowsily advised him to let the process advance at the diocesan level. As he’s been telling Skag for two decades, these things take time—beati from the ninth century are still short a second miracle. But Skag was characteristically insistent, especially after Dr. Liuni let slip that Euclide was in Tennessee. He offered to put on immediate standby a FreightConnex truck for conveying the investigator to Mississippi. Imagining Euclide, whose passion for his ’72 Maserati Spyder is opera-worthy, being sentenced to the passenger seat of a long-haul truck brought a pained smile to Dr. Liuni’s face. “This won’t be necessary,” he told Skag.
Euclide Abbascia’s first visit in Mississippi, after Father Ace, was to Dot Bearden. Bearden was the one who, less than a week after Cameron’s injury, issued a request for prayers for him on Facebook. Aside from doctors, the requester of the alleged miracle is the most significant figure in Euclide Abbascia’s investigations—more important, when they diverge, than the actual recipients of the miracle, called miracolati. The miracle, after all, is a form of communication between the saint or saint-in-waiting and the requester. Sometimes the requester and the miracolati are one and the same, but just as often they aren’t. The physical favor may be directed at someone else, in this case Cameron; but the spiritual favor, the answered prayer, is bequeathed to the requester.
Bearden was out on her front porch when Euclide pulled in. She leapt out of her rocker to gawk at the exotic car in her driveway, her head popping over the railing like a prairie dog’s, and devoted the first twenty minutes of the interview to telling Euclide about the classic Ford Mustangs her late husband used to restore. Bearden, who is eighty-two, exemplifies what people mean when describing an elderly person as spry: She exudes a honeybee’s industriousness, able to tend to the three great-grandchildren often in her care while constantly baking layer cakes and casseroles for the funeral luncheon ministry at St. Michael’s Catholic Church while also attending Mass four times a week and, once a week, getting her hair coiffed to maintain her Aqua Net-ed white swoop. She is that rare elderly person on whom exercise clothes look truly functional.
Yes, she told Euclide, of course she remembered the prayer. She pulled it up for him on the Microsoft tablet her daughter had given her the Christmas before:
Dorothy Alice Bearden Dear friends, I just heard that Biloxi H.S. graduate Cameron Harris has been very seriously injured while serving our nation over in Afghanistan. He needs our prayers!!!!! Please join me in praying to the Archbishop Nicholas Fahey for his full recovery and ret
urn home! Relying upon his merits and power before the Sacred Heart of Jesus we pray. Yours in Christ, Dot.
March 26, 2010 at 8:32 pm • 151
That she’d issued this prayer on social media was a novelty to Euclide, but one he welcomed. Normally he relies on requesters’ recollections of praying—when, how, and to whom—and must ultimately gauge that what they say they did, while kneeling silently in a pew, or alone in their bedrooms, is what in fact they did. But here was the ne plus ultra of forensic evidence: a documented, time-stamped prayer, as perfectly preserved on the internet as a DNA sample sealed in a jar.
Below Bearden’s post were thirteen replies, three of them expressing shock and dismay but ten indicating that a prayer chain did go into effect that spring. In subsequent questioning, Bearden told Euclide her Friday morning prayer group at St. Michael had maintained their prayers for Cameron’s recovery until someone heard he was back in Biloxi, and, sadly, unable to walk ever again.
Gently, Euclide pressed her:
Q: But you didn’t pray after that? After you knew he’d been paralyzed?
A: Oh, we knew he’d got paralyzed early on. Megan [her granddaughter] heard it from his sister. Once we all heard he was home and was safe, well, I reckon he fell off our prayer list. But I kept praying for him.
Q: You did?
A: Yessir I did.
Anatomy of a Miracle Page 21
