She couldn’t believe her eyes.
There, on the paper before her, she had written Pope John Paul II’s name in handwriting clear enough to read.
“The pen skipped across the page,” Sister Marie Simon-Pierre would tell Vatican investigators later.
Until that moment, the French nun, then 43, had been so racked by Parkinson’s she could barely hold a pen, let alone write.
Unable to process what appeared to be happening, the nun retired to her bed and woke up at 4:30 a.m. to another revelation — she had slept through the night for the first time in months.
“I got up fully alive,” she said.
The Parkinson’s symptoms that had turned her life into a living purgatory were gone.
The “miracle nun,” as she is being called, will be part of the throng in St. Peter’s Square when John Paul is canonized Sunday.
Simon-Pierre’s neurologist could offer no medical explanation for why the nun is now symptom-free. Neither could Vatican investigators, who concluded in 2007 — after a two-year investigation — that it was intercession by the late Pope that caused her to recover.
“John Paul has healed me,” she declared.
The miracle was a long time coming.
Simon-Pierre was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2001, a crippling disease that usually afflicts people far older.
Assigned to a maternity ward in the southern French city of Aix-en-Provence, the disease began taking its terrible toll so quickly that soon she was unable to hold the babies for fear of dropping them.
Her left side became frozen and at night the pain was so great she couldn’t sleep.
At the time, John Paul was also being ravaged by Parkinson’s, and the sight of him suffering was too much for Simon-Pierre to bear.
“It reminded me of what I would be in a few years’ time. I had to listen to his broadcasts rather than watch them,” she said.
When John Paul died in 2005, Simon-Pierre’s condition worsened and her order began praying regularly to John Paul to ease her suffering.
Then, exactly two months after the Polish pontiff died, Simon-Pierre told Vatican investigators, “Something in my heart seems to say, ‘Take up a pen and write.’
“To my great surprise I saw that the writing was clearly legible,” she said in sworn testimony.
In the morning, Simon-Pierre said, the pain and stiffness were gone and replaced by what she called an “inner strength.”
“I realized that my body was no longer the same,” she said. “I was convinced that I was cured.”
For two years, the Vatican kept Simon-Pierre’s claims a secret as they subjected the nun to repeated examinations by neurologists and psychiatrists.
But Simon-Pierre harbored no doubts about what happened to her.
“Ten months have passed now since I interrupted all types of treatment,” she wrote in her testimonial. “I am working normally again, I have no difficulty in writing and I also drive long distances. It feels as if I have been reborn: a new life, because nothing is as it was before.”
And it’s all thanks to John Paul and God, she said.
“What the Lord has granted me through the intercession of John Paul II is a great mystery difficult to explain with words — something very great and profound,” she wrote. “But nothing is impossible for God.”
