A Vatican investigator has found enough evidence of a miracle in the survival of Kansas man Chase Kear that it intends to keep studying his survival, with an eye toward declaring it an official miracle towards the canonisation of Fr Emil Kapaun, Church officials say.
Declaring it a miracle would help determine whether Fr Emil Kapaun of Pilsen will be canonised as a saint of the Catholic Church, Kansas.com reports.
Andrea Ambrosi, a lawyer and investigator for the Vatican, visited family members and doctors for two Wichita area families last week who believe the survival of their children during nearly lethal medical crises recently should qualify as miracles.
One of them involved Chase Kear, a 20 year old Colwich athlete severely injured in October.
Fr John Hotze, judicial vicar for the Wichita diocese, is not allowed to say who or what families are being investigated for miracles. But he said there was one other "alleged miracle" in the Wichita area that Ambrosi studied during his time here.
With both families, Hotze said, Ambrosi met with the doctors involved and studied medical reports and X-rays.
"Afterward, the Vatican investigator said that in years of investigating miracles, he had never seen doctors who made such a compelling case for miracles occurring," Hotze said.
Fr Hotze has investigated Kapaun's proposed sainthood for eight years, which is only a fraction of the time the Church has been considering whether to elevate Kapaun to sainthood.
American soldiers came out of prisoner of war camps in 1953 with incredible stories about Kapaun's heroism and faith. They said that in the fierce winter of 1950 and 1951, when 1,200 out of 3,000 American prisoners starved to death or died of illness in Camp 5 along the Yalu River, Kapaun kept hundreds of survivors alive by stealing food and by force of will.
Kapaun was assigned to the US Army's Eighth Cavalry regiment, which was surrounded and overrun by the Chinese army in North Korea in October and November 1950. He stayed behind with the wounded when the Army retreated. He allowed his own capture, then risked death by preventing Chinese executions of wounded Americans too injured to walk.
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Investigator for Vatican finds enough to continue (Kansas.com)
LINKS
Emil Kapaun (Wikipedia)
Emil Kapaun (Knights of Columbus 3744)
Vatican studies Korean war hero Kapaun miracle (CathNews USA)