Boy’s survival hailed as a ‘miracle’

FATIMA, PORTUGAL— The parents of a Brazilian boy whose recovery from a severe brain injury is being cited by the Vatican as the “miracle” needed to canonize two Portuguese children broke their silence Thursday to share the story.

Joao Baptista and his wife, Lucila Yurie, appeared before reporters at the Catholic shrine in Fatima, Portugal, on the eve of Pope Francis’s arrival. Francis will commemorate the 100th anniversary of the so-called Fatima visions of the Virgin Mary by canonizing two of the three children who experienced them.

The “miracle” required for the canonization concerns the case of Lucas Baptista, whose story has to date been shrouded in secrecy.

His father said Thursday that in 2013, when Lucas was 5, the boy fell 6.5 metres from a window at the family’s home in Brazil while playing with his infant sister, Eduarda.

The ambulance to the hospital took an hour and, when Lucas arrived, he was in a coma and had suffered two heart attacks, Baptista said. During emergency surgery, doctors diagnosed a severe traumatic brain injury and a “loss of brain material” from the child’s frontal lobe.

Doctors said Lucas had little chance of survival and, if he did live, would be severely disabled or even in a vegetative state, his father recalled.

Baptista said he and his wife, as well as Brazilian Carmelite nuns, prayed to the late shepherd children who said the Virgin Mary appeared to them in “visions” in 1917. Two of those children, siblings Francisco and Jacinta Marto, will become the Catholic Church’s youngest-ever non-martyred saints on Saturday. The third child, Lucia dos Santos, the boys’ cousin, became a Carmelite nun. Efforts are underway to beatify her, too, but couldn’t begin until after she died in 2005.

Joao Baptista, wearing a shirt and tie as he read a statement at the Fatima shrine and pausing to compose himself, said doctors removed tubes from his son six days after the fall.

“He was fine when he woke up, lucid and started talking, asking for his little sister,” Baptista said. After another six days, Lucas was released from the hospital. “He’s completely fine . . . with no after-effects. Lucas is just like he was before the accident,” his father said. “The doctors . . . said they couldn’t explain his recovery.”

Journalists were not allowed to ask questions.