Her healing, which saved her life and the life of her unborn child, was accepted as the miracle needed for the 19th-century British cardinal's canonization.

Pope Francis announced July 1 that he will declare Blessed John Henry Newman a saint Oct. 13.

Coincidentally, the miracle accepted for his beatification in 2010 also involved someone from the United States: Deacon Jack Sullivan, 71, of Marshfield, Massachusetts, was healed of a several spinal condition in 2001.

Recounting her own story, Villalobos, 42, told Chicago Catholic that in 2011, "my husband brought home a couple of holy cards with Cardinal Newman's picture on them. I put one in the family room and one in our master bedroom."

"I would pass his picture in the house and I would say little prayers to him for whatever our family's needs were at the time — the children, my husband, myself.

"I really started to develop a very constant dialogue with him," said Villalobos, a mother of seven.

Her prayers had a miraculous result in 2013 when she started bleeding during the first trimester of a pregnancy.

At the time she had four children — ages 6, 5, 3 and 1 — and a previous pregnancy that had ended in miscarriage.

"When I went to the doctor, he did an ultrasound and he said the placenta had become partially detached from the uterine wall, so there was a hole in the placenta and that hole was allowing blood to escape," she said.

Villalobos also developed a subchorionic hematoma, which is a blood clot in the fetal membrane. It was two-and-a-half times the size of the baby.

The doctors recommended bed rest.

On Friday, May 10, 2013, Villalobos went to the emergency room because the bleeding was worse.

Again, the doctor recommended strict bed rest, which was difficult to imagine with four small children and a husband who had to work.

The doctor also told the couple that a miscarriage was likely, but if the baby survived the pregnancy, she would likely be born prematurely because she would be small.

Added to the stress was the fact that Villalobos' husband, David, had to leave for a mandatory business trip.

"Wednesday morning I woke up in bed in a pool of blood. My husband was already in an airplane on his way to Atlanta," Villalobos said.

She put off calling 911 because she didn't know who would care for the kids if she was taken in an ambulance to the hospital.

She made them breakfast and told them to stay put before going upstairs.

"Now the bleeding was really bad because I had just gone up the stairs, which I really shouldn't have done. I kind of collapsed on the bathroom floor out of weakness and desperation."

Villalobos laid there thinking she should now call 911, but she realized she didn't have her cellphone. She also knew the force of yelling for her kids would cause more damage and bleeding.

She was hoping one of her children would wander into her room so she could ask them for her phone to call 911, but they didn't. She heard nothing from her children and the silence made her even more worried.

With thoughts of losing her unborn baby, worry for her children downstairs and wondering if she could die, Villalobos uttered her fateful prayer.

"Then I said, ‘Please, Cardinal Newman, make the bleeding stop.' Those were my exact words. Just then, as soon as I finished the sentence, the bleeding stopped." Continue reading

• Image: Catholic Register

The sixteenth century Catholic martyr and the nineteenth century convert and confessor; the witty teller of merry tales and the seemingly sensitive controversialist.

With a second glance, the viewer sees what they share: Both of them were born in London (actually in the City of London); both attended the University of Oxford; if More was "made for friendship" in Erasmus's famous line, Newman selected "Cor ad cor loquitor" (Heart speaks to heart) for his motto as Cardinal, emphasizing the bonds of friendship and personal influence.

They shared a desire for holiness and seeking out truth; they are both Catholic (More by birth and nurture in a Catholic family; Newman by adult conversion); More and Newman defended the truth with their pens, taking on the subjects of their day (heresy's attack on Catholic teaching in More's era; liberalism's attack on religious truth in Newman's).

Most importantly, for both of them, the true Catholic understanding of conscience was crucial in their lives.

For More, following his conscience led him to martyrdom; for Newman, following his conscience led him to become a Catholic.

More and Newman revealed their understanding of conscience's purpose, authority, and source in defense of the authority of the Church's magisterium and the role of the papacy in the Catholic Church.

While they are often cited as defenders of individual conscience, they also stressed the source of conscience's authority in each individual: God's law, natural and revealed—and the Church's role in teaching and defending that law.

By what authority?

Rather than consulting Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons or Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, Catholics would do well to read St. Thomas More's own words about conscience and authority in his letters and other works.

In For All Seasons: Selected Letters of Thomas More (Scepter Publishers), edited by Stephen Smith or The Last Letters of Thomas More, edited by Alvaro de Silva (Eerdmans), readers may grow to appreciate how convinced More was that his conscience, responding to Catholic teaching, was leading him in the right direction. Continue reading

Source and Image:

• The Catholic World Report, article by Stephanie A. Mann, the author of Supremacy and Survival: How Catholics Endured the English Reformation.