Pope John Paul II, the Divine Mercy Pope, blesses Maureen and Bob Digan. Maureen was healed of Milroy’s lymphedema after her husband felt led to take her to St. Faustina’s tomb to pray for healing. That miracle resulted in the beatification of the Polish sister who is now known as the Apostle of Divine Mercy!
Filmmakers know a story when they hear it. So when Filmmaker/Producer Elizabeth Wilda was asked to meet with Maureen and Bob Digan, she immediately agreed. After all, as Sister Ruth McGoldrick of the Sisters of Providence had explained to her, Maureen Digan, who suffered from Milroy’s lymphedema, had been cured after praying in front of St. Faustina’s tomb at the behest of her husband Bob. In addition, after that same visit, her invalid son Bobby was partially healed.
However, for a filmmaker, a good story is only one part of the equation. As she delved into it, Wilda quickly realized that, from a worldly perspective, the decision to film Maureen and Bob Digan’s story was, well, “nuts.” At least that’s what Wilda’s husband told her.
Bob & Maureen Digan
For one thing, Wilda had a busy full-time job at the University of Massachusetts, where she had already filmed a number of historical documentaries. Her projects included one on the Sisters of Providence, from whom she got the introduction to the Digans, and one on Catholic Sisters in America, which was shown on public television. So she didn’t exactly have a lot of time on her hands.
Even worse, there was no budget. As in zero, zilch, nada. How was she supposed to finance this venture which would ultimately result in the documentary, “In the Name of Miracles,” which airs at 1:30 p.m. ET, Sunday, April 30 on EWTN?
Maureen Digan with her son Bobby, who was also partially healed at St. Faustina’s tomb. The young boy lived another 10 years after that healing.
Despite significant obstacles, Wilda obviously decided to take the project on. But why?
“I met Maureen and Bob and fell in love with them,” she said. “They are great people. I also met Fr. Tony, who was Maureen’s spiritual director. He’s at Mount Holyoke, which is 15 minutes from me.”
But, of course, liking her subjects is only one part of the answer. It was the Lord who put this project on her heart; it was the Lord who took her on what she now calls a seven-year faith journey.
“I didn’t know much about the Divine Mercy devotion before this,” she said. “I thought it was for Polish people! But I loved what I learned. I fell in love with Faustina. It’s enriched my life so much. I’m very grateful to God for the whole process.”
And what a process it was! The reason it took seven long years to get the documentary made was because Wilda had to do all the filming “on the side.”
The Sisters of Providence introduced Filmmaker/Producer Elizabeth Wilda to Maureen and Bob Digan and encouraged her to make a film telling their story. “In the Name of Miracles” airs 1:30 p.m. ET, Sunday, April 30 on EWTN.
“Whenever I had the time, I’d go film something,” she said. “I had purchased a basic music library that was copyright free so I could use that. And Bob had tons of family photos, which I scanned and used.”
As she worked, Wilda began to see that the resulting documentary, “A Time for Miracles” was, above all, a love story.
“It’s a love story on many levels,” she said, “It’s a love story about God, and a love story with Bob and Maureen. Bob – I think his faith is so rock solid that it’s inspiring. Maureen has a beautiful outlook, such a sparkle about her, she’s inspiring too. I want to let people know that nothing’s impossible. We have a wonderful God and all things are possible. It’s never hopeless.”
Wilda also began to understand on a deeper level than ever before what she calls “the big thing — that God loves everyone.”
Maureen & Bob Digan
Wilda also began reading everything she could about St. Faustina. “I can’t get over what an amazing woman she was and how open to the spirit. With what little education she had, the beautiful writing of her ‘Diary’ is extraordinary. You can’t help but be inspired by it.”
As she learned more and more about the Divine Mercy devotion, Wilda’s sense of purpose grew. She realized that the devotion is more important now than ever. In fact, she believes the Lord meant it for a time such as the one in which we are now living.
“Just looking at the darkness in the world today – people need hope. I want to let people know that nothing’s impossible. We have a wonderful God and all things are possible. It’s never hopeless.”
“In the Name of Miracles,” the story of Maureen Digan whose miraculous healing resulted in the canonization of St. Faustina, is available for purchase from EWTN Religious Catalogue.
Need hope? Need light? There is much more to this story than what we’ve revealed here. Find out more, when EWTN airs “In the Name of Miracles” at 1:30 p.m. ET, Sunday, April 30. Want to purchase your own copy of this film or discover other Divine Mercy-related items? Check out EWTN Religious Catalogue at http://bit.ly/2pN9V12.
After you watch the documentary, please let us know what you learned and how you think it might change your own life!
More than a decade after this tragedy, EWTN will commemorate “Terri’s Day” with two special events. First, Philadelphia Archbishop Charles J. Chaput will celebrate Mass at 8 a.m. ET, Friday, April 7, with encores at noon ET and 7 p.m. ET. The Mass is part of an annual day of prayer and outreach, which focuses on medically vulnerable patients and families who must fight for their right to proper care. Archbishop Chaput will speak during the Mass about issues impacting America’s medically vulnerable.
Finch sought the advice of a counselor who he says posed questions he would never have thought to ask on his own. “In one of those conversations, the counselor said: ‘How can you be so bitter, resentful, and angry with a man who didn’t know how to be a dad?’”
During the Reign of Terror in 1793, French Catholics – who lived in a country that was predominantly Catholic – found out. You can too when EWTN airs “The Hidden Rebellion,” an original docu-drama which describes one of history’s most chilling instances of genocide – a genocide in which 70% of those slaughtered by revolutionary mobs and soldiers were not nobility, as is commonly supposed, but fellow commoners. (Airs 10 p.m. ET, Saturday, Nov. 5 on EWTN, 
Most importantly, you’ll come to understand the ideology that led the revolutionaries to slaughter so many of their own countrymen.
Says Rabourdin: “In the free market, in a free republic, we say to citizens, ‘Feel free to create and to prosper. We will, as a government, only stop you if you commit a crime. We’re not the ones who reward you either. We are only here to do justice.’” 
“So they had, and still have today, a plan for micromanaging human life,” Rabourdin continues. “It is in the DNA of their ideology. It’s why they want to take charge of the education of children. It’s why they try to outlaw home schooling. It’s why today we feel the oppression of political correctness. It’s oppressive because they attempt to reach into the smallest actions of our lives: actions such as what words we must use when we address a woman or a man.”
Despite all the above, Rabourdin isn’t pessimistic. He says that today’s Catholics face a battle for hearts and minds, maybe even their own hearts and minds – just as they did during the French Revolution — and it won’t be won by “a sad version of Christianity.”
He also believes this is a time when Catholics need to do a better job of re-learning the social teachings of the Church; teachings such as subsidiarity. “By this we mean that if a ‘lower’ level of society, like the family, can do a job well, such as educating children, the higher level of society, like the city, must not do the job of the family. What the city or the government can do is to help the family to do its job well with such things as tax breaks and allowing families to make their own decisions about how they want to educate their children. This is the alternative to the micro-management of top-down socialism.” 
In 1801, after seven years of terror, Napoleon would eventually sign an agreement with the Pope admitting that Catholicism was the religion of most of the French people and declaring that they were again free to publicly practice their religion. Nevertheless, to this day, church buildings in France remain property of the state. Rabourdin said the school system also remains “extremely anti-clerical so the young have been indoctrinated against the Faith and many other things for 200 hundred years now. It’s not surprising then that only 4% of the population still practice the faith.”
Says Rabourdin: “I came to America because there is more freedom here for a man of good will; double that for a man who is Christian. But I can see the signs that America is becoming like France now. And I speak of the France affected by the excesses of the French Revolution. It’s still up to us to have a better society. We should never give up the fight. We should do it in peace,” he says, “but do it!”
The mini-series airs 9:30 p.m. ET, Wednesday through Saturday, Oct. 26-29. The Wednesday airing will be preceded by a special “EWTN Live” interview at 8 p.m. ET with Producer, Writer, and Director Stefano Mazzeo, and Professor Thomas F. Madden, chair of the Department of History at St. Louis University, both of whom EWTN viewers will remember from their work on a previous blockbuster mini-series: “The Crusades.”
“The mini-series features live action drama sequences and interviews with leading historians and churchman to reveal the truth about one of the most misunderstood periods in Church history,” said EWTN President & COO Doug Keck, who served as Executive Producer of the series. “There were, in fact, multiple “inquisitions” in different countries over the centuries, including the widely misunderstand Spanish Inquisition.”
For example, did you know that many misrepresentations about the Spanish Inquisition were developed over four centuries ago by Protestant Northern Europe as part of a propaganda campaign against the Catholic Church? Producer Mazzeo says that Spain was the Catholic superpower of the age and the Protestant countries needed a stick with which to attack Spain and the Catholic Church in order to cement the Reformation and secure the loyalty of their converts. In other words, they needed to give people a reason not to want to be Catholic! Of course, that’s not the only reason. There was also the fact that England and Spain were locked in a battle over land in the New World, and more.
The problem is that these fake Catholics were introducing heresies and immorality into the Church. “The main reason for the Inquisition was [to help insure] that everyone would go to heaven,” Mazzeo continued, which is one reason only those who had been baptized were tried. “They did not want people to lose their souls. [Many will be surprised to learn that] while heresy was a crime punishable by death by the state, “the clerics of the Inquisition were forbidden to engage in torture or even to pronounce the death penalty!” 
contrast, in countries that had an Inquisition in place, many prisoners in secular prisons blasphemed in order to be transferred and tried by Inquisitors because they were much more lenient.
“The way Pope Pius XII is treated is a black legend,” Mazzeo said. “The Crusades was a black legend of the Enlightenment period. Today, militant secularists create black legends that the Church is anti-women. For example, the witch craze hysteria that swept Protestant Northern Europe in the Early Modern Era saw thousands of women being executed on hearsay of or the testament of a jealous neighbor. In Catholic countries, where the Inquisition was in place, if someone was accused of things like sleeping with the Devil or flying, the Inquisitors became very skeptical; they were university-trained canon lawyers and theologians!” 
Why is political discourse so bad right now? How have Christian beliefs, particularly Catholic beliefs, and those who hold them come to be reviled by so many in the secular culture? Where did political correctness, gender conflict, gender confusion — and so many other aspects of the Culture of Death — come from?
As a young novice, Fr. Mitch – like most of us — had no idea what Alinsky-style community organizing was all about until he, and several other novices, were assigned to a Chicago parish that just happened to have two priests trained in the technique. These priests wanted to stop the violence between the Hispanic, Black and Italian gangs and touted Alinskyian style organizing as a way to do this.
You’ll have to tune in to find out what happened in that Chicago parish, but suffice it to say that Father Mitch personally witnessed the execution of a former gang member – as a result of this demonization and stirring up of “enmities” with the goal of trying to help people – which had a profound effect on him.
For many Catholics, it will be enough to know that this Community Organizer dedicated his most influential work, “Rules for Radicals,” to Lucifer. You read that right. His dedication reads: “Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgement of the very first radical who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom, Lucifer.”
Norman Thomas, America’s Socialist Party candidate in the 1940s once said: “The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism. But under the name liberalism they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program until one day America will be a socialist nation without knowing how it happened.”
If you were to see a brochure from a Catholic travel company advertising a trip to a country with some of the world’s most gorgeous medieval Catholic churches, a roster of legendary saints, and a spring of healing water, what country would you suppose they were promoting? France? Portugal? We’re going to guess that Sweden would not be one of the countries that came to mind – and with good reason!
Silfverling, who recently visited EWTN in the hopes of starting a Catholic television station in his country, has made it his mission to find and photograph Sweden’s amazing Catholic past in the hopes of restoring its Catholic future.
As a consequence of the Reformation, Silfverling says “the King commanded that church frescoes be whitewashed;” in other cases, frescoes on church walls were destroyed when windows were installed. While Silfverling says the people didn’t want to do this, they did. Fortunately, the whitewash ended up protecting the images, as did the fact that most of these churches had no heat.
Like the Catholic Church, Sweden’s Lutheran Church has experienced a great decline in numbers; Silfverling also says it has become very secularized. “It’s more or less a social institution,” he said. “Most Lutherans here only go to church for weddings and funerals.”
Meanwhile, it is Catholics like Silfverling who keep the Church and her history alive. In addition to the great St. Brigid and the recently canonized St. Mother Elizabeth, Silfverling delights in telling the stories of lesser known Swedish Catholic saints like St. Botvid and St. Romfar – saints whose histories help tell the story of Catholicism in Sweden.
Here’s where things get interesting. Silfverling said he was told that once that larger church was built, St. Botvid’s remains had to be exhumed and his coffin carried to the new church. However, the coffin was too heavy to carry without the pallbearers resting the casket on the ground. This they did, exactly two kilometers from the old church. According to Swedish oral tradition, which is very strong, a spring of pure, clean, cold water immediately gushed from the ground. As in Lourdes, France, many healings reportedly occurred when people walked into these waters.
Silfverling also loves telling the story of St. Romfar. Although some of the stories about this 13th Century Swede may be the stuff of legends, they convey a sense of who this man was to his countrymen. St. Romfar was converted abroad and became a priest. It is said that he returned to Sweden with a beautiful chalice. Because his would-be parishioners were not yet Christianized, Father Romfar feared the chalice would be stolen. So he announced: “Whoever steals this will be hanged.” Some days later, the chalice was stolen. When the priest questioned the people, they told him to look in his backpack. It was there and so, the story goes, they hanged him. Today, in Sweden, there is beautiful church named after St. Romfar, as well as an association.
A few weeks ago, Silfverling traveled all the way to Irondale, Alabama from Sweden with his wife. His initial goal is to start an EWTN affiliate in his country. Even though EWTN provides extensive satellite coverage, relatively few cable TV operators in Europe carry the Network as they consider that, in the highly secularized environment which prevails in Western Europe, Catholic religious programming would have a very limited following.
who want to know more about how Catholics in Sweden are living out their faith.”
