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Danila Castelli was born on 16 January 1946. A wife and family mother, she lived a more or less normal life until the age of 34 when she started having spontaneous and severe blood pressure hypertensive crisis. In 1982 some ultrasound tests detected a right para-uterine mass and a fibromatous uterus. Danila was operated on. In November 1982, she went through more surgery which found a large number of tumours. More surgical interventions followed in the attempt to stop the triggers to the crisis until 1988 but with no improvement at all. In May 1989, during a pilgrimage to Lourdes, Danila got out of the Baths where she had been immersed in the water and she felt an extraordinary feeling of peace. Shortly after, she reported to the Lourdes Office of Medical Observations (Bureau des Constatations Médicales de Lourdes) about her instantaneous cure.

After five meetings (1989, 1992, 1994, 1997 and 2010) the Bureau certified the cure with a unanimous vote : ‘Mrs Castelli was cured, in a complete and lasting way, from the date of her pilgrimage to Lourdes – 21 years ago – of the syndrome she had suffered and with no relation with the treatments and the surgeries she received’.

Danila Castelli has since gone back to an absolutely normal way of life. The CMIL (Lourdes International Medical Committee) during its annual meeting of November 2011 in Paris certified that the cure ‘remains unexplained according to current scientific knowledge’. On 20th June 2013, Monsignor Giovanni Giudici, Bishop of Pavia, the diocese where Danila Castelli lives, declared the miraculous character and the value of this cure. It was the 69th cure of Lourdes recognised as miraculous by a Bishop.