[LINK] "Was ailing nun the first saint in Toronto?"

[rfmcdonald]

So asks the Toronto Star's Leslie Scrivener.

The news came surprisingly quickly from the Vatican, where ecclesiastic decisions usually unfold over years, not days or weeks.

Five months after asking, the Catholic Archdiocese of Toronto has permission from Rome to assemble a panel of theologians and historians to delve into the life of Sister Carmelina Tarantino, a plain-spoken nun who spent decades bedridden in hospital, to see if she has sufficient "heroic virtue" to be a candidate for sainthood.

The Archdiocese calls the inquiry "unprecedented and historic"--a first for Toronto. The Vatican has declared her case nihil obstat--there is nothing to hinder proceeding to study "her reputation as a woman known for her holiness," Archbishop Thomas Collins wrote in a letter to Toronto priests.

[. . .]

Sister Carmelina, who was 55 when she died in 1992, was a "pleasant woman with a pale and suffering face," according to her medical records. Unable to move from her bed at Riverdale Hospital (now called Bridgepoint Health), she began receiving visitors.

Her common-sense advice on spiritual and social matters, dispensed in Italian, drew people to her for counselling. There were often petitioners lined up in the hospital hall waiting to see her.

"The first visit to her was, for me, the beginning of an interior transformation," according to a testimonial by a witness identified as I.S.

All this, while enduring pain.

Sister Carmelina's left leg was amputated during treatment for bone and skin cancers. Her wounds were constantly bleeding, and dressings had to be changed several times a day. Later she underwent a mastectomy.

She was consumed by poor health: pneumonia, tuberculosis, various infections and cataracts, which led to loss of vision in one eye. She underwent 26 surgeries and let it be known that if she were to undergo a 27th, she wanted doctors to operate without anesthesia so she could offer up her pain as a sacrifice.

She came to Canada to join five of nine siblings already here and hopefully get treatment for her ailments. At the time, she was expected to live only months.

"That was the prognosis from every doctor who operated on her," says Joseph DiGrado, a former hospital chaplain who has been gathering evidence in support of Sister Carmelina's cause. "There really was no hope for her."