{"id":47556,"date":"2025-07-28T18:55:07","date_gmt":"2025-07-29T01:55:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newmexicopbs.org\/productions\/newmexicoinfocus\/?p=47556"},"modified":"2025-07-28T18:55:11","modified_gmt":"2025-07-29T01:55:11","slug":"fact-checking-miracles-inside-the-multiyear-effort-to-canonize-sister-blandina-segale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newmexicopbs.org\/productions\/newmexicoinfocus\/fact-checking-miracles-inside-the-multiyear-effort-to-canonize-sister-blandina-segale\/","title":{"rendered":"Fact-checking miracles: inside the multiyear effort to canonize Sister Blandina Segale"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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The Vatican may grant sainthood to a nun who knew Billy the Kid, tended the sick, taught children and advocated for immigrants. Making that happen requires a unique blend of faith and boots-on-the-ground dedication.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

By Molly Montgomery, Searchlight New Mexico<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This story<\/a> was originally published at Searchlight New Mexico<\/a>, a NMPBS partner.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Illustration by Diana Branzan<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

There are lines in an old play that changed a woman in Albuquerque into a magician. Her name is Lisa Cousins. This was maybe 30 years ago. She loved to read, especially books about the spiritual realm, because when she\u2019d given birth to her first child, the love she felt for him was so deep that she believed there must be more than the material world. In the first year of his life, she dreamt every night that she lost him. Then she\u2019d find him again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When he was ten, she read Percy Bysshe Shelley\u2019s 1820 play \u201cPrometheus Unbound,\u201d which is about a network of mythological beings freeing a beloved son from a cruel punishment. It ends with a call to \u201chope till Hope creates\/From its own wreck the thing it contemplates.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many times she read it. Her son, she recalls, was reading about Harry Houdini. She recognized the beauty of the play in Houdini, <\/em>a being who could escape any confine. So she trained to be a magician: she learned to turn white silk into colored silk, and to make a watch vanish from one of her wrists and materialize on the other, and to make a woman appear in a box.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Twenty or so years passed. Then, Cousins believes, a Catholic nun named Sister Blandina Segale transformed her into a grandmother. Sister Blandina was born in 1850. She died in 1941. But her devotees believe that she listens from beyond the grave.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

“Asked about the relevance of Blandina\u2019s life to lives today, her champions often point to the global hostility and violence toward immigrants. Archbishop John Wester, head of the Archdiocese of Santa Fe, says that the care Blandina showed to people who\u2019d recently arrived in the U.S \u201cgives a model of what I believe our country should be, how the posture of our country should be toward immigrants.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Cousins felt she\u2019d lost her son, for reasons she doesn\u2019t want to discuss. Conversation between them had become rare and difficult. She was living in Hollywood by then, performing at the Magic Castle, and he was living in Albuquerque with his partner and a child, a baby girl.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nine months after the child\u2019s birth, Cousins traveled to Albuquerque to see her. She couldn\u2019t reach her son. Traipsing around Old Town, feeling \u201ca loss of a whole part\u201d of herself and a sense that her efforts in raising him had been \u201cworthless,\u201d her eyes fixed on the name of the gift shop for the San Felipe de Neri Parish: Sister Blandina Convent. More than a century ago, Blandina had lived and taught there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cousins wasn\u2019t Catholic, but she wandered into the gift shop and bought a one-dollar booklet titled \u201cHow to Pray the Rosary.\u201d On a sidewalk bench, she opened it. At that instant, she got a text from her granddaughter\u2019s mother, asking if she\u2019d like to see her granddaughter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The date, September 21, was the same day that Blandina, many years ago, opened the first public school in Albuquerque, according to a plaque on the building. \u201cIt was the start of my education,\u201d Cousins says. \u201cShe was still teaching.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Lisa Cousins holding her rosary booklet. Photograph by Nadav Soroker<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThis Journal which I propose keeping for you\u201d<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Go back about 150 years and north about 250 miles. One night in December, on the plains of southeastern Colorado, a 22-year-old Blandina sat in a stagecoach with what she would later describe in a journal entry as \u201ca lonely, fearful feeling.\u201d She\u2019d left her siblings and parents in Ohio. She\u2019d been missioned to a Colorado town called Trinidad, which she\u2019d pictured as a community on the island of Cuba.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The darkness drowned the grasses and clotted into the Sangre de Cristo Mountains ahead. At the eastern edge of the mountains lay the town. A few more hours in the stagecoach, jolting and shuddering over packed earth, and she would arrive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The driver stopped for supper, but the night scared Blandina so much that she couldn\u2019t eat. In Ohio, some men had told her that \u201cno virtuous woman is safe near a cowboy.\u201d Now cowboys were \u201cconstantly\u201d on her mind. Around midnight she heard footsteps. A \u201ctall, lanky, hoosier-like man\u201d clambered into the carriage beside her, she wrote. \u201cBy descriptions I had read, I knew he was a cowboy!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Without asking permission, he draped over her a buffalo hide that he called, in a Western twang, his \u201ckiver.\u201d Beneath the kiver, she thought of God. Then \u2014 and it\u2019s not entirely clear why she did what she did next; maybe she was surrendering to God\u2019s will \u2014 she shifted her body so that the cowboy could more easily shoot her through the heart.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI expected he would speak \u2014 I answer \u2014 he fire,\u201d she wrote. \u201cThe agony endured cannot be written. The silence and suspense unimaginable.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But instead of a gunshot she heard questions. \u201cWhat kind of a lady be you?\u201d he asked. She said she was a Sister of Charity. He wanted to know whose sister she was, and if she was \u201cQuaker like.\u201d She wanted to know why he became a cowboy. He said he\u2019d read about them and run away from home. She asked if he\u2019d written to his mother. \u201cNo, madam,\u201d he said, \u201cand I allow that\u2019s beastly.\u201d She told him to write to her as soon as he got off the stagecoach. \u201cI will, so help me God!\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A few years after Blandina took up her calling in Trinidad, she was missioned to Santa Fe, and then to Albuquerque. (Later, she would return to Ohio.) During many of her years in the Southwest \u2014 22 in all \u2014 she wrote journal entries for her biological sister and fellow nun, Justina, who was assigned to various locations around the Ohio Valley. Blandina called Justina her \u201cdearest dear\u201d and told her about amazing things she\u2019d done out West: saving a man from a lynch mob; befriending outlaws like Billy the Kid and trying to steer them away from violence; motivating townspeople to build schools, where she taught.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Santa Fe, she lobbied the legislature to fund one of the first public schools in the state and spent a good deal of time tending the sick at St. Vincent Hospital, which nuns from her order had established a decade earlier. At one point, a Santa Fe county commissioner refused to pay for patient burials; Blandina made sure he\u2019d pay by threatening to deliver a corpse to his office. Another time, the roof of the hospital caught fire, and Blandina climbed a drainpipe so fast that men watching from the ground believed she had levitated. \u201cI marvel how composedly I acted,\u201d she wrote to Justina, adding a little later: \u201cI doubt not the men think I\u2019m either a saint or a witch.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1932, by which time Justina had died and Blandina had turned 82, she published the journal as a book called \u201cAt the End of the Santa Fe Trail.\u201d Who knows why one narrative takes hold and another slips into oblivion, but Blandina\u2019s stories captivated people. In the decades that followed, she appeared in comic books and on television, cast as an innocent nun venturing out to the Wild West.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Blandina is depicted in the television series \u201cWild West Chronicles,\u201d in a 2023 episode called \u201cSister Blandina and the Killer\u201d https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=-7orITFJZhU<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

A friendship between a nun as pure as Blandina and an outlaw as sinful as Billy the Kid seems an unlikely thing, an angel talking to a demon. Other writers seized on those sorts of details and spun them into narratives that accorded with colonial ideas so fundamental to U.S. culture that they still often go unquestioned: that the West was a place in need of civilizing, and that the Catholic church could be a civilizing force.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Blandina\u2019s notoriety persisted into the 21st century. In the early 2000s, a man named Allen S\u00e1nchez \u2014 the president of an Albuquerque-based community health organization that Blandina founded \u2014 prayed with her in mind. The prayers and the journal guided him during a transition that the organization, CommonSpirit St. Joseph\u2019s Children, was weathering at the time. It endured, and S\u00e1nchez began to think Blandina might be a saint.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Backed by the CommonSpirit St. Joseph\u2019s Children board, he took the idea of canonization to Michael Sheehan, who was then Archbishop of Santa Fe. Eventually, the Archdiocese opened an investigation as part of a \u201ccause\u201d \u2014 a complicated, multi-step process, often spanning many years, in which a council at the Vatican scrutinizes the deeds a person performed in life and the miracles attributed to them in death, to determine whether they qualify as a saint. This marked the first time that a New Mexican diocese had asked the Vatican to examine a candidate for canonization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As word spread about the investigation, more and more people began talking to Blandina while they prayed. Hundreds of nuns and thousands of parishioners, many in Colorado, Ohio, New Mexico and Italy, have prayed to her at least a few times. Devotees have now attributed 51 miracles to her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But before all this fame, there was a journal that belonged only to two. In Blandina\u2019s first entry, she told Justina that the account was a \u201cJournal which I propose keeping for you.\u201d She opened the published version with these words: \u201cInto the keeping of this Journal of my Life in the Southwest, there never entered the thought of its publication. The reward for the work involved was to come if Sister Justina and myself would meet and read it together.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is a document of separation. Before Blandina went west, she had to say goodbye to her family for many years. She writes more than once that she managed not to cry. The repetition suggests that it took some effort.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Sister Blandina Wellness Gardens in Trinidad, Colorado. Courtesy of Phil Long Dealerships<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The patron saint of immigrant children<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Separation was not a new experience for Blandina. When she was four, she, her parents and three sisters left a northern Italian village called Cicagna. Their family had lived there, among fruit orchards, for generations. They crossed the ocean and landed in New Orleans and immediately encountered violence: The day they docked, a man hit Blandina\u2019s father in the head, while another tried to kidnap her. She clung so tightly to her father\u2019s hand that the man couldn\u2019t pull them apart. She cried out in Genoese, and other immigrants overheard and stopped to help. The attackers fled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The family split up for a few months so that Blandina\u2019s father could look for housing in Cincinnati. (The reason he chose that city is unclear.) Blandina went north with him and prayed to be reunited with her mother and sisters. Eventually, the whole family reached Ohio and moved into a one-room apartment divided into four quarters by strips of calico hung from wires. Blandina\u2019s sister Catalina, a young child, fell ill and died soon after.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Blandina\u2019s early memories informed her work. She was often critical of the United States government for its treatment of non-citizens. In the 1890s, not long after she returned from the Southwest, she and Justina were reunited in Ohio, and together they went on to establish a settlement house and lead classes for immigrants, among other efforts. Blandina also worked to prevent human trafficking. If the Vatican canonizes her, she\u2019ll be the patron saint of immigrant children.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s not unusual for the Vatican to saint someone whose life is in some way relevant to a contemporary issue. A popular figure soon to be canonized, Carlo Acutis, was a technologically savvy Milanese millennial. In life he built a website listing miracles, and in death he is said to have cured a boy of a pancreatic defect and a woman of a brain hemorrhage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cCanonization is always about holiness, but it\u2019s never only about holiness,\u201d says Kathleen Sprows Cummings, a professor of American Studies at Notre Dame. \u201cIt\u2019s about what need that saint, and the saint\u2019s story, fulfills for the church at any given moment in time and in any given place. To my mind, it doesn\u2019t detract from a person\u2019s holiness at all to acknowledge that.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Asked about the relevance of Blandina\u2019s life to lives today, her champions often point to the global hostility and violence toward immigrants. Archbishop John Wester, head of the Archdiocese of Santa Fe, says that the care Blandina showed to people who\u2019d recently arrived in the U.S \u201cgives a model of what I believe our country should be, how the posture of our country should be toward immigrants.\u201d Wester says she also stands as a counterexample to sexist stereotypes \u2014 through her courage, stamina, toughness and practicality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Blandina\u2019s cause may have the indirect effect of mitigating problems within the Church as well. Alongside dozens of dioceses across the country, the Archdiocese of Santa Fe declared bankruptcy in 2018, as part of a process of settling lawsuits with people who\u2019d been sexually abused by priests, usually as children. The cause, Wester says, is \u201ca reminder that the church is infinitely bigger than a bankruptcy or sex abuse scandals, which the church must continue to reckon with.\u201d After the bankruptcy, Wester asked worshippers to pray to Blandina, along with St. Francis and Our Lady of Guadalupe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"An
Archbishop John Wester. Photograph by Nadav Soroker<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

But the coincidence of the cause and the bankruptcy is just that, Wester says. \u201cWe didn\u2019t say, \u2018Oh, dear, we\u2019re having all these troubles. Let\u2019s see if we can make a saint.\u2019\u201d He points out that the cause opened years before the bankruptcy, and that it was initially supposed to be overseen by the Archbishop of Cincinnati. It was transferred to Santa Fe because of the time Blandina spent in New Mexico.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Allen S\u00e1nchez says that it\u2019s God who decides when a cause will open, for reasons that may or may not obviously tie in with contemporary issues. He had the idea to petition for Blandina\u2019s cause because she emboldened him during a difficult time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

CommonSpirit St. Joseph\u2019s Children opened as a hospital at the beginning of the 20th century; at the beginning of the 21st, it became a community health organization focused on early childhood services. As board members navigated the transition, S\u00e1nchez says, they found \u201cconsolation\u201d in Blandina\u2019s stories and began to discuss the possibility of asking the church to look into her deeds. But they didn\u2019t take any action.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then, in 2013, S\u00e1nchez learned that there were three nuns, ages 98, 100 and 101, who had memories of spending time with Blandina. They were the only people who could provide testimony about working alongside her. If the board of CommonSpirit St. Joseph\u2019s Children waited any longer to petition for the cause, S\u00e1nchez worried, investigators might lose the opportunity to interview the nuns. So they voted unanimously to sponsor the effort.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhatever is happening in society today, it\u2019s a different deal,\u201d S\u00e1nchez says. \u201cEleven years ago, we weren\u2019t having mass deportations. But her story fits the time. That\u2019s how God works.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cPomp and ceremony\u201d<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

S\u00e1nchez \u2014 a leader in the effort to repeal the death penalty in New Mexico and a member of the State Investment Council \u2014 is also an advocate for immigrants\u2019 rights. At a rally in February, he stood on a stage beside the New Mexico Roundhouse. Before a cheering crowd, he addressed President Trump. \u201cMr. Trump! Mr. Trump! Jesus was an immigrant!\u201d he shouted. \u201cI forgive you! But you gotta change! You gotta change your mind! You gotta change your heart!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Allen S\u00e1nchez. Photograph by Nadav Soroker<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Blandina has inspired much of S\u00e1nchez\u2019s recent work. He spent a decade lobbying the state legislature to appropriate funds for early childhood education and believes that she was there with him, since she had lobbied for education herself. In 2022, New Mexico became the first state in the nation to guarantee early childhood education as a constitutional right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Secular publications have often described petitioning for sainthood as lobbying. S\u00e1nchez says it\u2019s more like a court case. But the persistence he displayed in the legislature should serve him well in Blandina\u2019s cause: the process can span decades, sometimes centuries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Church officials look for extensive proof that a person is, in fact, holy, in the ways they\u2019re hoping to promote. The proof required is twofold: petitioners must show that the candidate lived a heroic life; they must also show that the person is in Heaven, talking to God. Miracles, which usually take the form of physical healings that can\u2019t be explained through worldly causes, demonstrate that this conversation is happening: It is God who performs them, but it is the saints who intercede between Him and the people on Earth who pray for help. If a miracle happens right after someone spoke to a saint in prayer, it means the saint had God\u2019s ear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gathering evidence can be extremely time-consuming and expensive, involving, among others, a petitioner, who asks the church to open a cause; archivists and investigators, who research a candidate\u2019s life; doctors, who testify that there\u2019s no medical explanation for reported healings; and postulators, often compared to lawyers, who argue the candidate\u2019s cause before a council at the Vatican. Some modern groups have paid more than half a million dollars to support causes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Historically, the process has often been riddled with corruption<\/a>, with funds disappearing into the coffers of the postulators. Pope Francis worked to implement greater transparency, and Pope Leo XIV has positioned himself to continue that effort. Experts note that wealth doesn\u2019t guarantee sainthood, but the fact remains that it\u2019s very difficult to petition for sainthood without money.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou need some money, because you need to compensate people for their labor,\u201d says Professor Cummings, who also compares the process to a court case. \u201cIf you want to bring a suit against somebody, you need to hire a lawyer. And then, if you want to appeal the decision, you need to hire more lawyers.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over the past decade, S\u00e1nchez talked to priests and a private investigator, doctors, the elderly nuns who knew Blandina, people recovering from illness and people turning to her in despair. Researchers gathered 14,000 pages of evidence about her deeds and miracles and sent them to Rome, translators translated correspondence written in English, Italian and Latin and a postulator arranged the documents into an 800-page testament to her saintliness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In June 2024, nine historians at the Vatican approved the account, meaning that there is now a possibility that the Pope will recognize Blandina\u2019s heroic virtue by announcing that she\u2019s Venerable. If people can prove that a miracle is attributable to her, the Pope may declare her Blessed; if a second miracle occurs after this declaration, she may become Saint Blandina.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So far, CommonSpirit St. Joseph\u2019s Children, which has a trust fund of over $100 million, has spent $83,017.85 on the required costs of the cause \u2014 mostly covering printing and the salaries of postulators, researchers and translators.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

S\u00e1nchez says that CommonSpirit St. Joseph\u2019s Children has spent more than $85 million on early childhood services and argues that the expenses of Blandina\u2019s cause are well worth it. \u201cIf this inspires immigrant children, then it\u2019s worth every penny,\u201d he says. \u201cThere might be people who object to spending money on this instead of feeding families. We\u2019re creating the good will that will feed more families.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some of those who love Blandina don\u2019t care whether she is officially recognized. Sister Kathryn Ann Connelly, a Sister of Charity in her nineties, says she\u2019s run into several people who pray to Blandina but aren\u2019t concerned with the Vatican\u2019s procedures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere are lots of people that don\u2019t go for the pomp and ceremony, and they don\u2019t go for the amount of money that it takes to go through this process,\u201d she says. \u201cThere are people who are being hurt by the church, and some are being driven away. They\u2019re finding God someplace else. And they\u2019re not happy with that, they\u2019re sad about it, but that\u2019s the way it is.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Photograph by Nadav Soroker<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe correct spirit of Catholicity\u201d<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Blandina arrived in New Mexico as the U.S. was colonizing the territory. Those who honor the priests and nuns who traveled here often point to their work building hospitals and schools. There\u2019s also a more painful history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Spanish had colonized New Mexico long before; Catholic leaders were active and often violent participants in that conquest. But many of the descendants of Spanish and Indigenous people modified Catholic traditions and integrated them into their lives. After 1848, as the U.S. government took over the territory, those practices became subject to colonization. The Archbishop of Santa Fe, Jean-Baptiste Lamy, a Frenchman who came to New Mexico by way of Cincinnati in 1851, denounced New Mexicans\u2019 traditions and tried to force New Mexican Catholicism into a European mold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhen he comes here, he looks at us as very low-class people,\u201d says Robert Mart\u00ednez, New Mexico\u2019s State Historian. \u201cWe have our penitentes, which he\u2019s shocked by. We have our santos; he thinks they\u2019re ugly, that our adobe churches are ugly. He thinks the local priests like Padre Mart\u00ednez or other priests with names like Gallegos and Ortiz are immoral, insufficiently Catholic, and he feels that it\u2019s his mission and duty to re-Catholicize us.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lamy hired French architects and Italian stonemasons to construct a Romanesque cathedral around the adobe cathedral near the Santa Fe Plaza. Workers carried the old cathedral out in pieces through the new front doors. He declared that spires should be erected atop the flat roofs of other adobe churches. \u201cThat\u2019s a metaphor,\u201d Mart\u00ednez says. \u201cHe was putting those on top, trying to make them look more European and less New Mexican, less Puebloan, less Mexican.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lamy also directed members of various Catholic orders to come to the territory. \u201cNative Americans and Hispanics are savage and inhuman, and anyone who comes here to somehow improve us, save us, that\u2019s beatitude,\u201d says Hilario Romero, a former State Historian, who has discovered, through oral history, sexual abuse of New Mexican children by the Jesuit priests Lamy oversaw.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another order who came at the behest of Lamy was the Sisters of Charity, Blandina among them. She adored Lamy. She called him \u201cbeloved\u201d and a \u201chero\u201d of the church. Like him, she criticized the penitentes, writing to Justina that they possessed \u201cnot the least conception of the correct spirit of Catholocity.\u201d She later wrote that \u201cthe Indian possesses the vices of barbarism, but he also possesses a nobleness of character, by which, with just treatment, religion and civilization, he can attain to the ideal man.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although Blandina could be blind to the church\u2019s colonialist tendencies, she was critical of colonialism elsewhere. She defended Indigenous people\u2019s land rights and railed against the U.S. government for its betrayal of treaties and agreements, as well as for its genocidal campaigns. She condemned the way U.S. \u201cland grabbers\u201d were displacing Mexican people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How these conflicting tendencies affected her relationships with people in New Mexico isn\u2019t entirely clear, though I couldn\u2019t find evidence that anyone had issues with her. Gov. Richard Dillon, who led the state from 1927 to 1931, encouraged Blandina to publish her journal and praised her \u201cheroic achievements.\u201d Albert Daeger, a former archbishop of Santa Fe, wrote in a 1930 letter that \u201cSister Blandina is still remembered by many of the \u2018old timers\u2019 out here, and they know that what she says or writes is the truth.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nor did I find anyone who seriously opposes the canonization effort. Romero says he doesn\u2019t believe Blandina deserves to be a saint, because some of the attention surrounding her comes from her unexpected connection to Billy the Kid. He notes that another nun who worked in New Mexico around the same time, Katharine Drexel, has already been sainted. He thinks, however, that Blandina should be honored for her work founding schools.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mart\u00ednez says Blandina set \u201can excellent example\u201d for Christians and non-Christians alike. Canonization \u201cdoesn\u2019t mean Sister Blandina was perfect,\u201d he says. \u201cIt means that when she fell short of that Christian and Catholic ideal, she got back up and kept going.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cTo be loved\u201d<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

As part of the effort to prove that Blandina lived a heroic life, former Archbishop Sheehan appointed a private investigator named Peso Chavez to look into her autobiographical accounts. Based in Santa Fe, Chavez has been investigating all kinds of people for more than half a century. He worked as a public defender before turning to the private sector, and has researched issues ranging from homicides to civil lawsuits to death penalty cases. What he has repeatedly learned, he says, is that \u201cwe all want to be loved, and we all want to love.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chavez recalls Allen S\u00e1nchez saying to him, \u201cPeso, go out and find whatever you can, good, bad or indifferent.\u201d Chavez describes the freedom he felt as \u201cjust beautiful.\u201d In previous cases, he\u2019d sometimes researched old events, from maybe 30 years ago. He was following Blandina 140 years into the past. He began with her journal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The journal is full of fantastic images that are difficult to verify. A tall outlaw in velvet rides a \u201cspirited animal of unusually large proportions.\u201d A woman Blandina describes as a \u201chuddled dressed-up skeleton\u201d with a terrified expression crouches in a corner, begging for a place to die. A patient on the roof of St. Vincent Hospital \u201cdances to the moon.\u201d Blandina is momentarily struck blind while carrying a coffin. She calls herself a \u201cshrunken resurrection plant\u201d \u2014 a ragged desert species that can survive without water for years. She describes insects that rain down from the ceiling of a dining room as \u201codoriferous acrobats\u201d that have great \u201cknowledge in mind reading.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A mural inside St. Vincent Hospital focuses on Blandina\u2019s contribution to its history. Photograph by Nadav Soroker<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The journal also contains frequent descriptions of Blandina\u2019s own heroism. In Trinidad, she reported that a mob was clamoring to hang a man who\u2019d shot another. She encouraged the perpetrator to apologize and accompanied him past the mob to the bedside of the victim. The victim forgave him, and the men in the mob, who were craning their necks to listen to the interaction, allowed the shooter to live and stand trial in court.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Famously, she described three encounters with William Bonney, better known as Billy the Kid. She wrote that she first met him while tending to a dying friend of his. He told her he was planning to scalp four doctors who had refused to help his friend. She persuaded him not to. A couple of years later, she was traveling across the plains between Las Vegas, New Mexico, and Trinidad with some men who were greatly afraid of Billy. He was rumored to be near. If he was, she believed, he\u2019d be carefully watching the plains. So she prayed the rosary on the open land at dusk to signal to him that she was among the travelers. When he passed them the next day, he waved his hat in the air and made his horse dance. She saw him a third time while visiting someone in the Santa Fe jail. His hands and feet were chained to the ground, and she lamented \u201cthe extreme discomfort of the position.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

S\u00e1nchez asked Chavez to research these stories with particular care. He sifted through old court records and newspaper articles and tried to imagine an earlier Southwest, a place of dirt roads and saloons that doubled as courtrooms. Using a court docket and a newspaper article, he was able to prove that the trial of the forgiven shooter did, indeed, take place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Things got tangled when Chavez learned that several men referred to themselves as Billy the Kid in the late 1800s. Different historians have offered different accounts of where the real William Bonney was at any given time. \u201cThere were all kinds of Billy the Kids,\u201d Chavez says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But ultimately he found no reason to doubt Blandina\u2019s descriptions. In two instances, it seemed plausible that Blandina and Bonney were in the same places at the same times. In a third, he found a courthouse record of Bonney being jailed around the time Blandina recalled visiting the jail.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now and then, the dates and geographical locations Blandina recorded don\u2019t make sense. But the discrepancies could be attributed to the fact that she compiled her book from various entries, decades after she wrote them, potentially editing errors into the text.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Regardless, her devotees tend to believe her wholeheartedly. S\u00e1nchez sees Blandina\u2019s self-confidence as a kind of humility, a refusal to be false. \u201cPart of humility is acknowledging your talents and acknowledging your abilities,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reading the journal, I found myself thinking back to the note Blandina opens it with \u2014 how she kept it so that she and Justina could read it together. From 1873 to 1874, Blandina stopped keeping the journal, because, she said, \u201cThe things I could write are so ghastly that they had better be left untold.\u201d Two years later, she wrote, \u201cDear Sister Justina, were I to write many of the incidents of daily occurrence, this journal kept for you instead of giving you a little diversion, and perhaps a wee bit of knowledge, might bring you only sadness and weariness.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Justina\u2019s presence made me recall the line in Shelley\u2019s play that meant so much to Lisa Cousins: \u201cto hope till Hope creates\/From its own wreck the thing it contemplates.\u201d Blandina\u2019s hope to make Justina happy, and to be close to her, seemed to motivate the writing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI think the real holiness or specialness of the book,\u201d S\u00e1nchez says, \u201cis that you\u2019re grasping what she\u2019s intending for Justina.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lungs that were turning to stone<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Since the nine Vatican historians have approved the account of Blandina\u2019s heroic life, those arguing for her cause now must show that she\u2019s in Heaven and can talk to God. The evidence will consist of miracles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The miracles that the Vatican counts have to be inexplicable by worldly forces. They typically take the form of healings that doctors don\u2019t understand. Religious officials and physicians hired to work on the cause interview other physicians about whether they know of anything that could explain the healings. Petitioners also have to demonstrate that it was Blandina alone who affected the miracles. The easiest way to do so is to show that those who prayed for them prayed to her alone and that the miracles occurred soon after the prayer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In all, S\u00e1nchez says, of the 51 miracles attributed to Blandina, at least 45 involve physical healings, though not all happened immediately after people prayed to Blandina.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because the miracles involve people\u2019s medical histories, they\u2019re protected by privacy laws and can\u2019t be revealed to the public. Church officials know about them because the miracles\u2019 recipients brought them to their attention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pam Kent, a hairdresser from Cincinnati, told me about one she received. In January 2014, Kent was having trouble breathing. Doctors told her it was probably asthma, maybe bronchitis. In April of that year, she says, \u201cthe air was just not there.\u201d She couldn\u2019t breathe well enough to get off the couch. Her fingers and lips turned purple. She was sent to the ICU and emerged ten days later with an oxygen tank and an order for bed rest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A pulmonologist categorized the condition under the umbrella term \u201cinterstitial lung disease,\u201d meaning that Kent\u2019s lung tissue was thickening and hardening, though it wasn\u2019t clear why. In her hair salons, she may have breathed chemicals from aerosol cans, which, the doctors speculated, could have caused the damage \u2014 though Kent doesn\u2019t think so, since she was careful about cleaning the air with industrial purifiers, and none of the women she worked with got sick. She says that one pulmonologist used the words \u201cbroken glass\u201d and \u201choneycombing\u201d to describe what her lungs looked like on scans. He told her that the scarring was basically turning the tissue to stone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By midsummer, on an X-ray, it appeared that the scarring was \u201cworking its way up the lungs.\u201d Because the doctors didn\u2019t understand what had caused the condition, Kent wasn\u2019t a candidate for a lung transplant. The pulmonologist warned her that, within two years, her lungs would likely fill with fluid that would drown her. She watched three people die of the same disease.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kent had gone to a high school in Cincinnati, where nuns from Blandina\u2019s order taught. One of them, Sister Kathryn Ann Connelly, who\u2019d been Kent\u2019s principal and later a hair client, saw her in church when she was sick. The sister and other nuns, unbeknownst to Kent, decided to pray to Blandina every night at 6 p.m. for Kent\u2019s healing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the winter of 2015, Kent could sit up without using her oxygen tank. By early 2016, she was weaning herself off of it. The scarring receded. She lived.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt\u2019s very hard for me to comprehend it,\u201d she says. \u201cBecause why me?\u201d If there\u2019s any answer, she thinks it might have to do with how she listened to her clients while she cut their hair. She says she\u2019d do anything for them, and they\u2019d do anything for her. \u201cI was their friend,\u201d she says. \u201cI was their confidante. I was their everything.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The communion of saints<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The sainthood process draws a line between what\u2019s official and what isn\u2019t, what counts and what doesn\u2019t. As I talk to people about Blandina, the fabric of their relationships with her often seems woven from things that don\u2019t count toward canonization \u2014 emotional coincidences that occur in daily life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A woman named Faye Ramirez, a team leader at CommonSpirit St. Joseph\u2019s Children, attributes to Blandina a coincidence that prevented a mother from being separated from her baby. The baby was in the hospital and required special formula. The mother told the medical staff she couldn\u2019t afford it, which led to them call New Mexico\u2019s Children, Youth and Families Department to alert them that she couldn\u2019t adequately provide for the child.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Faye Ramirez. Photograph by Nadav Soroker<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Ramirez visited the mother, who asked for help. Then Ramirez returned to the CommonSpirit St. Joseph\u2019s Children office, talking with coworkers about what she could do. She happened to glance down at a donation box. It contained the exact formula the mother needed. \u201cThings happen, and really, there\u2019s no answer,\u201d Ramirez says. \u201cSo I always say, \u2018It must have been Sister Blandina.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Undergirding the theology of sainthood are ideas about relationships. There\u2019s a network of relationships between the living and the dead, called the communion of saints: the living pray for the dead so that God will move them from Purgatory to Heaven, and the dead in Heaven talk to God to help the living.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Archbishop Wester places importance on relationships when he\u2019s discussing sin and grace. \u201cSin is what fragments,\u201d he says. \u201cYou name any sin, and it breaks down relationships.\u201d He gives examples: racism and other forms of bigotry, slavery, failing to acknowledge another\u2019s dignity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAnd grace,\u201d he says, \u201cbuilds up relationships.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Learning about canonization, I\u2019m struck by various tensions: How Catholic hierarchies and institutional abuse have led to fragmentation and loneliness among devotees; how the ideas about the networks of living and dead have led to deep relationships. How a private series of letters from one sister to another became the grounds for a sainthood process that is making one of the sisters famous. How her notoriety has, in turn, generated new interpersonal connections.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

More than a single miraculous physical cure, or a ceremony, what seems to draw worshippers to the church, and to hold them there, is the strange conversation of coincidence: people talking to each other across the borderline between west and east, life and death, one person and another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Cousins at the Sister Blandina Convent. Photograph by Nadav Soroker<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

After Lisa Cousins became a grandmother, she read Blandina\u2019s journal and learned that Blandina, more than once, told young men to write to their mothers. She was received into the church, with St. Anne, the mother of Mary and the patron saint of grandmothers, as her patron saint. Cousins made an Instagram page called \u201cOur Literate Lady\u201d and posted images she found of Mary reading, often beside Anne. To be near her granddaughter, she decided to move back to Albuquerque, and two weeks after she arrived she found out that she would soon have a second granddaughter. She spends her spare time with the two of them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

None of her relatives or close friends are Catholic. It\u2019s not unlike being the only spiritual, female magician. \u201cI do have a certain loneliness,\u201d she tells me. \u201cIt is a cynical world.\u201d But she finds companionship among the writers she loves, \u201ctwo thousand years of people,\u201d and she prays in Latin to pray with the same words they used, and they form a convent in her mind. \u201cBlandina,\u201d she says, \u201cis part of that convent.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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