By Jay Sorgi • Posted September 18, 2025

Paul Walsh fought for his life for 112 days in Delaware County hospitals after a car crash that doctors believed would take his life.

He and his family believe that God, through the intercession of Padre Pio, now St. Pio of Pietrelcina, saved his life, and the Franciscan friar who died in 1968 became present to Walsh in person on Easter Sunday in 1984.

“So many years have passed, but I can still recall his look,” said Walsh, now a 59-year-old resident of Ridley Park, about the miracle. “Not a day goes by that I don’t thank God.”

Local Catholics, like those at St. Bede Parish in Holland, Bucks County, also continue to give thanks to God as they revere the saint during an annual festival.

A multitude of miracles attributed to Padre Pio were not part of his official cause for sainthood, including Walsh’s, according to his mother Betty Walsh.

Their family still believes that the Italian Capuchin priest, whose feast day comes on Sept. 23, worked a miracle 18 years before he was declared a saint of the Catholic Church by Pope St. John Paul II in 2002.

Paul Walsh’s pathway to the miracle began with a horrible crash on Chester Pike in Prospect Park on a rainy, icy Dec. 3, 1983 when he was 17 years old.

“I heard from friends who were driving behind me in a car. A car pulled out in front of me, and I swerved to avoid hitting it and went into a telephone pole,” he said. “From then on, I don’t remember anything until Easter Sunday.”

Betty Walsh remembers how her son “was on the side of the road. The man who lived behind the accident scene, who worked at Temple Hospital, heard the crash and came running out. He found Paul in the gutter. It was pouring rain. He was under the water, and he was bleeding quite a bit from the mouth. He lifted Paul’s head up out of the water and the blood, and he waited there for the ambulance,” she said.

“A year later, I got a call from a man who said he lives right at the telephone pole that Paul went into. He said, ‘I am dedicated to Padre Pio, and I asked Padre Pio to please take this person’s soul straight to the Sacred Heart.’”

Paul was initially transported to Taylor Hospital, then Crozer Hospital for acute trauma care, but doctors told Betty they did not expect him to live.

Over the next few months he received care for a litany of maladies: hemorrhaging; surgeries to move his nose back into place and rewire his teeth; the leaking of brain fluid; multiple skull fractures; spinal meningitis; hydrocephalus or swelling of the brain; diabetes insipidus and a smashed pituitary gland.

“We started praying to the Blessed Mother, and she led us to Padre Pio,” said Betty. “We started saying the Padre Pio prayer over him. Paul was unconscious, but he blessed himself, and every day that was the only sign of life in Paul.”

Betty said she called the National Centre for Padre Pio, now in Barto, Pennsylvania but at that time located in Norristown. A representative visited and blessed Paul with a glove worn by Padre Pio.

Paul survived the spinal meningitis but was in a coma and spiking high fevers.

“Harry Calandra from the National Centre for Padre Pio blessed Paul again with the relic, and I just knew something happened because Paul shook like he had electric shock go through him. He opened his eyes and he looked around, and he looked so clear-eyed, and then he fell back into a comatose state again,” said Betty.

“The next day when I went in, he was sitting up. He was drawing with magic markers. He was watching television.”

Betty said that as these miracles were happening, Padre Pio appeared to both Paul and his roommate Raymond in the hospital on Easter Sunday.

“Raymond said to me, ‘There was an old priest in a brown robe who was here this morning, and we woke up and he was standing at the foot of Paul’s bed smiling at him. He didn’t say anything. He was just smiling at him.’ I said, ‘We don’t really know of any priest in an old brown robe,’” said Betty.

“He said, ‘Well, he was.’ We really believe that Padre Pio actually came to Paul Easter Sunday morning in the hospital.”

A doctor came to visit Paul and was stunned when he entered the room.

“I hear he’s talking. What does he want to eat?” Betty recalls the doctor asking, and she told him to ask Paul directly.

“I’ll take a cheesesteak and French fries,” was the reply, at which the doctor “fell against the wall,” Betty said.“He shook his head and he laughed. He couldn’t believe it because he had never heard (Paul) talk.”

Once Paul emerged from his comatose state, he said he “couldn’t get over how everyone was making such a fuss over me until I realized later on that I was in a coma for that long. Every day I get on my knees and thank God, every day since then.”

Paul, a graduate of St. James High School, would goon to Neumann University and work as a counselor for intellectually disabled people. Today he works at the Delaware County Courthouse.

Paul’s gratitude runs deep 42 years after those miracles moments, even for simple things like that first post-coma cheesesteak. How did it taste?

“It was great,” said Paul.

That description remains a dramatic understatement for the great miracle that God worked through St. Pio in Paul Walsh’s life.