By Jay Sorgi • Posted January 14, 2025

Many parishes in the Philadelphia region hold novenas that are dedicated to a particular saint.

Few of those novenas connect to the miraculous healing of a Delaware Valley teenager who is still alive today, a miracle that led to a religious sister being declared a saint.

Denise McKenzie spoke to her fellow parishioners at St. Bernadette of Lourdes Church in Drexel Hill on Wednesday, Jan. 8 as part of the parish’s novena in honor of St. Leonie Aviat, founder of the Oblate Sisters of St. Francis de Sales. The novena ended Friday, Jan. 10.

McKenzie related the story of her daughter Bernadette, who many years ago had a terminal illness but nonetheless received divine healing after intercessory prayers to then-Mother Frances de Sales Aviat during a parish novena.

“I was speaking to the people who, 33 years ago, knew she was ill,” McKenzie said of her talk Wednesday evening. “They knew she had this final condition, but they never knew the whole story, and so it was a very special experience to tell them the whole story.”

She said her daughter Bernadette, then 15, was miraculously healed on March 25, 1992. It was the Feast of the Annunciation and the fourth day of a novena that Denise and members of St. Bernadette Parish prayed to  the future saint.

“It was even more affirming when so many came up and said, ‘We had no idea that that’s what Bernadette went through,” McKenzie said. “To them, it made it even more special that they prayed not only for her cure, but that all of the misery and the pain that she went through was taken away, and they didn’t even realize all that she went through. And of course, it was people that I’ve known for years.”

What her daughter Bernadette went through was two years of incredible pain, a diagnosis of tethered spinal cord syndrome in which tissue attaches to the spinal cord and limits movement, and a series of surgeries that led to no medical solutions. McKenzie had no answers for her daughter,  and desperately called out to God in prayer.

“I was the least believer of the whole process,” she recalled. “I had been asked the whole time that Bernadette was ill to (pray) novenas to St. John Neumann, St. Katharine Drexel, Padre Pio and Leonie Aviat. For two-and-a-half years, I refused every offer.

“It wasn’t until we were given the prognosis that Bernadette would be bedridden the rest of her life, and I was asked again to do a novena to Leonie, that I finally said, ‘Okay.’”

Mary Kate Murphy, the director of religious education for St. Bernadette Parish and a longtime friend of Bernadette, said the Oblate Sisters themselves helped encourage the call to prayer.

“The sisters said, ‘Let’s pray,’” said Murphy. “We had all been praying here and there, but it was just sort of like going on with life. And (a) sister said, ‘No, let’s specifically pray to our foundress for her complete and total healing.’”

McKenzie, her parish community, the school where she taught, and Murphy’s community at then-Archbishop Prendergast High School began the novena on March 22, 1992.

Three days later, the astonishing miracle happened.

“When we left work for work that morning, my other kids went to school. She was in bed because she was bedridden,” McKenzie said of her daughter Bernadette.

“At the end of the day, when my husband and I came home from work, we were kind of meandering up the sidewalk to our home, and when we got to the front door, she met us at the front door standing perfectly fine, and said to us, ‘Something happened.’

“And I said, ‘What do you mean something happened?’ And she said, ‘I think it worked.’ And I said, ‘What do you mean?’ And she said, ‘Well, I don’t have any more pain. I think it’s the prayer.’”

God proved to Denise, a self-proclaimed “smart-aleck mom,” that her daughter truly had been miraculously healed from the pain of her condition, through – of all things – a dishwashing chore.

“She announced that she wanted to do the dishes,” McKenzie said, recalling how Bernadette said, “If I can stand and unload the dishwasher and load the dishwasher, then I know this really happened, so I’m going to do the dishes tonight.”

“That was the first experience with her telling us that she felt completely fine,” McKenzie said.

In 2000 St. John Paul II declared the miracle attributed to Blessed Frances de Sales Aviat, whom he had beatified in 1992. A year later, she was canonized by him.

Today Bernadette lives a quiet but fulfilling life as a mother of four children, two of which have college scholarships. The novena her family and the St. Bernadette of Lourdes community shares this week is one of gratitude – not only for a medical miracle, but for the miracles of faith that have spawned from it.

“It gave people a belief in hope that you can hope again,” said Denise McKenzie.

“I taught theology in middle school, and one day after teaching (about) miracles, a boy in my room asked if he could make a comment about Bernadette’s miracle. He said, ‘When you were telling us your daughter’s miracle, you said that you believed that Bernadette was cured because of the faith of the people in the parish in St. Bernadette and all of the other people who were praying.

“’I don’t think that’s why God cured her. I think God cured her because you didn’t have any faith. And he wanted to show you what faith would do.’”