On Sept. 15, 2010, Bonnie Engstrom went into labor after a healthy, low-risk pregnancy. What no one knew at the time was that her son, James, had a true knot in his umbilical cord that had tightened during labor and cut off his oxygen supply. When he was delivered, he was lifeless. James was without a pulse for 61 minutes. Just as the medical staff at the OSF HealthCare St. Francis Medical Center in Peoria, Ill., were preparing to call time of death, James’s heart started beating. And, in his mother’s words, “it never stopped again.”
The family asked for the intercession of Archbishop Fulton Sheen for their son’s life and for the complete healing of any damage to James’s body, and the answer to their prayers was recently approved as a miracle by Pope Francis. As a result, Fulton Sheen will be beatified later this year.
I talked with Bonnie by phone about the miracle, how Fulton Sheen’s cause for canonization has affected her family and what her hopes are for the church. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
Miracles are extraordinary events, and sometimes it’s easy to forget that they happen to ordinary families.
Yes! I am basically a stay-at-home mom, and I like to bake and plant flowers in my yard. My husband Travis is a high school science teacher, and he does handyman work. We have a big family, but our kids are just normal kids. Sometimes they watch too much television; sometimes they fight. They climb trees, ride bikes, just normal stuff.
And you’ve just been through a whirlwind over the past month! Your son’s miracle has been approved by the Vatican. On the day of his birth, after James’s heart started beating, how did events play out at the hospital?
I’ll never forget Travis saying to me: “James is alive. And everything is going to be O.K.” And he totally believed it. You could tell everyone else in the room was like, “Uh...that’s not what’s happening here.”
Because at that point the medical staff knew that James should have severe brain damage due to lack of oxygen?
Right. They expected him to die again due to massive organ failure. The hospital chaplain and our pastor arrived and said: “Travis, I know you did an emergency baptism. If you like we can confirm him.” We were in a state of shock. We weren’t processing what was happening.
So the offer to confirm James meant that everyone around you knew that he was close to death?
We assume the doctors told the hospital chaplain, “This baby is not going to live and the family is Catholic,” and with that information, the chaplain offered us confirmation. I remember asking, “But what will James do in seventh grade?” because I really didn’t understand what was happening.
And you started asking for prayers?
Shortly after the confirmation, we posted on Facebook and on my blog what had happened and asked for prayers through the intercession of Fulton Sheen. And because of social media, people all over the world were praying for a miracle: that James’s brain would be healed (after significant damage was shown on his first M.R.I.) and that his body would function normally.
Because of social media, people all over the world were praying for a miracle: that James’s brain would be healed.
What happened when the miracle was investigated?
After James’s followup M.R.I. showed that his brain was fine we called the Sheen Foundation to tell them about the miracle. When James was 1 year old, they opened the tribunal for three months until the investigation of the miracle was complete. Travis and I turned over all of the medical records; we and 15 other people were interviewed. Everyone had to answer the same list of questions for consistency’s sake—James’s doctors, the midwife, friends, pastors—to build the evidence for the miracle. The evidence was gathered and sent to Rome.
In March of 2014, the medical experts who advise the cardinals who make up the Congregation for the Causes of Saints unanimously approved it as a miracle with no scientific explanation at all. That June the theologians unanimously approved it as a miracle through the intercession of Fulton Sheen. Then there was the pause in the cause.
The pause in the cause being that Fulton Sheen’s cause for canonization was on hold for almost five years because the Diocese of Peoria was not given access to Sheen’s remains from the Archdiocese of New York. For your family, what was the emotional toll of waiting without knowing what would happen when you were so intimately connected to this beatification?
We basically had to accept that God’s timeline was different than ours. Travis and I both thought that the cause would progress and everything would be done when James was a little boy and when it would be easier for us to shield him from the spotlight. By the time he grew up, it would have all been in the past and the world would have moved on. And we’d have played the part God assigned to us. That’s something I argued with God about a lot: “Why did you let this happen? I’m worried for my son!” And now, James is almost nine, and the spotlight is back on our family, and Travis and I try to shield him from that as much as possible because he’s just a boy who wants to play and doesn’t want to be touched by strangers or put on a pedestal.
He wants to be James, not the Miracle Boy.
Yes! So for us, that was the hard thing. And it was hard to know how to handle wanting to protect our son’s privacy while also wanting to share the miracle with the world for the good of the church and the glory of God.
I hope that more people read and listen to Fulton Sheen and that as they encounter him, they will grow in their love of the Blessed Virgin Mary and in their love and appreciation of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist.
As James’s mother, how do you process the fact that God miraculously brought your son back to life when other parents’ prayers might not be answered the same way?
That is the hardest part of all of this, and it’s something Travis and I talk about a lot because it causes us a lot of sorrow. Not that we’re not grateful! But I don’t know why we got this. I don’t know why. I lost a baby in a miscarriage several years ago, and when I found out I was miscarrying I begged God to save my baby, and he didn’t. And when we found out our daughter Lydia would need open-heart bypass surgery we begged God that we wouldn’t have to go through that because going through open-heart surgery with your child is just horrendous.
I don’t know why God allows some suffering and why God answers prayers the way he answers them. But I have to trust and believe that everything works out for the good of those who love him. One of my favorite Bible verses is from Revelation, when Jesus says, “Behold, I make all things new!” So in every hard situation, I turn that over to God and I expect him to say, “Behold, I am making something new.” I can’t imagine what it will be; I don’t know why these things happen. But I know he makes all things new.
There’s no date announced yet for the beatification Mass, but when it occurs, will your family get to participate in some way?
[Peoria Bishop Daniel R. Jenky] has asked our family to present the relics at the Mass. Typically, that privilege is given to the person who has received the miracle, but since James is so young the bishop thought it would be great to have the whole family there.
What is your hope for the church with this beatification?
I have a lot of hopes. I hope that more people read and listen to Fulton Sheen and that as they encounter him, they will grow in their love of the Blessed Virgin Mary and in their love and appreciation of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist. I hope and pray that more men will hear and answer the call to become holy priests. I hope and pray that more people will spiritually adopt unborn babies. Fulton Sheen wrote that spiritual adoption prayer, and I hope that more people will come to love it.
I hope that people will come to know and love Christ more. Fulton Sheen loved God and he loved his faith, and that’s so obvious when he preaches and when he writes. The end destination of all saints should be that they lead us closer to Christ, and that’s what I hope and want for the church through this beatification.
How inspiring! One can't help but think of the marvelous maxim: “For those who believe, no proof is necessary. For those who don't believe, no proof is possible.”
It is a wonderful thing that this boy is healthy and thriving. Is it Ignatius who urged his seminarians to pray as if everything depends upon God, but to act as if everything depends upon us? Quite frankly, I am embarrassed by a church hierarchy that delights in spending so much time and money on these so called miracles. According to the church’s criteria, a believer has a better chance of winning at the Las Vegas slot machines than holding a winning ticket with God.
Paul, the Church is us. As St. Ignatius stressed, we must do our part. So the Church wants to make sure, so far as possible, that there is no human explanation for the recovery of James. With the inspiration of the saints we'll be able to help the poor "whenever we want to". James has come back to life and we must rejoice!
Well said, Rhett.
Sorry, Rhett, you’re preaching to the wrong guy. If it comforts you to believe in such things, so be it. But, I stopped accepting the pat answer, “It’s a mystery,” about the same time that I stopped calling priests “Father.”
A transcript of an interview in America: the Jesuit Review is hardly an exhaustive treatise of the full story.
This hard-bitten and long experienced doctor has witnessed first hand the return from the dead of at least one person who was known to be the subject of intense loving prayer and most certainly dead.
There is actually nothing brief, casual or gullible about the inquiry into this report behind the scenes by the delegated investigators. If the full date were given you, it would be pearls before swine.
That being said, I totally agree that presbyters being called "Father" is wrong and harmful, and to my mind inexplicable as it is so literally forbidden in the New Testament.
Sorry, Rhett, you’re preaching to the wrong guy. If it comforts you to believe in such things, so be it. But, I stopped accepting the pat answer, “It’s a mystery,” about the same time that I stopped calling priests “Father.”
The idea of “creating Saints “ was good insofar as it held up men and women who led exemplary lives and were presumably given the high speed train to heaven. But that recognition morphed in to assigning them some special relationship with God whereby they could serve as interlocutors for those who thought themselves inadequate to speak to God directly. We can all speak to God. No one needs Fulton Sheen to do their bidding. It’s time for the Church to come to the recognition that all of us have equal standing to talk to our Creator.
My New Testament assures me that I too can pray for something and if I have faith the size of a mustard seed it will happen.
I see nowhere it being claimed that Sheen was the only one capable of interceding for this boy, he was the one who was asked.
Please provide evidence that your faith is such that answers like this follow your intercession, sometimes at least, or keep your mean spirited whines to yourself.
Your faith is smaller than the faith of this loving mother and smaller than that of Sheen, how is that for manifest inequality.
While I certainly am happy for the boy James and his family, I must agree with posters Paul Kendrick and Dennis Doyle. In a world where 6.3 million children under the age of 15 died in 2017 from a long list of unfortunate maladies, it is the epitome of hubris and simpled-minded devotion to poor epistemology to think that god saved YOUR (American, of course) child while letting MILLIONS of others die. I actually think it is SELFISH to have such beliefs.
"An estimated 6.3 million children under the age of 15 years died in 2017. 5.4 million of them were under the age of 5 and 2.5 million of those children died within the first month of life. This translates into 15 000 under-five deaths per day."
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/children-reducing-mortality
B.TS, what we have here is the scandal of particularity. God chose the Jews as the focal point of Revelation; then Mary to mother the Messiah; then Jesus chose the 12; etc. But these choices aren't choices to the exclusion of others. They are chosen for the sake of others. What God has done in the recipient of healing He wills to do in all. This is what faith in the Gospel means. As Revelation stresses, in the end all tears will be wiped away!
Amen, Rhett!
Unrelated - America's Editors, please consider implementing Disqus for comments rather than this extremely unwieldy format.
Then your shame, and the shame of the little-faiths and the apostates and the heretics commenting here would be exposed to the whole world..
Unfortunately, this kind of thinking leads to shame and compounding of suffering and grief in loss for other families. In my hospital I cannot tell you the number of times I've come across families, particularly Roman Catholic, who lose their baby, or their child (or their family) to illness who then turn around and beat themselves up again and again, saying "if only I'd prayed more" or "I didn't pray enough," or "maybe my faith is not strong enough," or "perhaps I'm not good enough for God to see my faith" or any number of fears of self-worth in God's eyes. Many of these families who lose their children are more faithful and orthopraxic than the "very best Catholic." It's heartbreaking to see this kind of thing perpetuated.
Dionys, I agree such experience as you relate is not infrequent. And it is heart wrenching. Yet I think it is a necessary dynamic for growth in faith. At some point such experiences often lead to an acceptance that the tragedy was under God's loving Providence. As St. Paul says, for those who love God all things work together unto good. Think of the alternative of believing that tragedy has the final word- nihilism. Jesus Himself prayed for deliverance but accepted God's Wisdom as best.