Tomorrow week an Irishman will be beatified in the Vatican along with Pope John XXIII and Pope Pius IX.
Dom Columba Marmion was born in Dublin in 1858 but spent most of his life in Belgium, where he died as abbot of Maredsous Benedictine Abbey in 1923. The miracle necessary for his beatification is believed to have happened to Mrs Pat Bitzan of St Cloud, Minnesota, in 1966.
Mrs Bitzan also has Irish connections. Her sister, Betty, was married to the writer J.F. Powers and they lived here for many years, while Mrs Bitzan's great grandparents were Irish.
She told The Irish Times yesterday she became aware of "Abbot Marmion" when diagnosed with lung cancer in 1966. Then a 39-year-old mother of seven children, she had had a breast removed earlier that year due to cancer. Four months later cancer was discovered in her lungs.
She learned of Dom Marmion from a leaflet brought to her in hospital by Father Arnold Weber, a monk of St John's Benedictine Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota. Through him she was put in contact with Father Elcuin Deck of the Benedictine Abbey at Aurora, Illinois, which was known as Marmion Abbey, having been founded 10 years after Dom Columba's death.
Father Deck wrote to the postulator for the cause of the beatification of Marmion in Rome, Father Benedict Becker. He advised Mrs Bitzan to pray to God for healing through Marmion.
In August 1966 Mrs Bitzan and her husband, Don, went to Maredsous and prayed with the Benedictine monks there at the tomb of Dom Marmion, each day after Mass. She recalled that when she put her hand on the tomb for the first time she immediately felt a bond with Dom Columba, and when she returned to the US she experienced "a tremendous sense of well-being". Within months the cancer in her lungs had cleared and her doctor was at a loss to explain it.
In 1979 the Vatican started an investigation into the circumstances of her recovery. A local panel reported to Rome after a three-week inquiry. Rome rejected the suggestion that what had happened Mrs Bitzan was a miracle, describing it instead as "a happy coincidence".
The matter rested until the early 1990s when Father Mark Tierney of Glenstal Abbey, Co Limerick, and Father Ferdinand Poswick of Maredsous Abbey, both vice-postulators for the cause of Dom Marmion, got moving "and feathers began to fly" as they "stormed Rome", she recalled.
In January of this year Pope John Paul proclaimed that what had happened to her in 1966 was a miracle.
Mrs Bitzan and her family will go to Rome for the beatification on Thursday. She feels "very humbled this has happened to us" and "so grateful". Since her own cure, her sister and a niece have both died of breast cancer.
Father Tierney will write about Dom Marmion in The Irish Times "Rite and Reason" column next Tuesday
