Saint Dulce of the Poor
In 2019 Pope Francis canonised Irmã Dulce, a nun who built a huge charity hospital in Salvador. The second miracle accepted was the restored sight of a musician who had been blind for 14 years.
2019 CE · -12.93, -38.51 · status: official
The account
Dulce Lopes Pontes (1914–1992) began by sheltering the sick in a chicken coop beside her convent. Her foundation now runs one of Brazil's largest free hospitals.
The researched reading
A striking recovery of sight that doctors involved could not explain, but one assessed only inside a canonisation process. A natural explanation is more likely, with a real share left open because the records are closed.
| Explanation | Weight | Why |
|---|---|---|
| A known natural phenomenon | 40% | Glaucoma destroys optic-nerve fibres permanently, so a full return of sight after 14 years would be unprecedented; the likelier natural reading is that part of his blindness had a reversible cause (corneal swelling from high pressure, inflammation, cataract) or was misjudged, and press reports say he still has glaucoma but now sees. His full records have not been published for outside review. |
| A cultural story | 22% | The healing was investigated inside a canonisation cause for a hugely popular Brazilian figure; the Church’s medical board is not an independent scientific review and the case is told as devotion. |
| Perception, memory or mind | 20% | Functional (non-organic) visual loss can recover suddenly, and the first “vision” came at night during a painful conjunctivitis with an image of Dulce over his eyes; how much sight he had before is known mainly from his own account. |
| Genuinely anomalous | 15% | If the diagnosis of advanced glaucomatous blindness was accurate, recovery has no medical explanation, which is why the Vatican accepted it; the data to confirm that diagnosis are not public. |
| A hoax or fabrication | 3% | No sign of fabrication; José Maurício Moreira is a public figure and his doctors took part in the inquiry. |
Official position: The Vatican’s medical board and the Congregation for the Causes of Saints accepted the cure as a miracle in May 2019, leading to her canonisation.