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Pope Francis officially recognized a second miracle attributed to the intercession of Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati, and announced that Frassati is to be canonized on August 3, 2025. Now, years after the occurrence, the priest who experienced the second miracle is opening up about his experience of having been healed from an ACL tear, an injury that requires surgical intervention to fix.
In an interview with Angelus News, Father Juan Gutierrez explained that he became injured during his time in the seminary in 2017. A routine pickup game of basketball led to him feeling as though his ankle bumped into something, accented by a “pop” sound that left him uneasy. He couldn’t finish the game, but the pain wasn’t so bad that he felt he needed immediate medical attention.
He soldiered on for a few days until one of the other seminarians was headed to the hospital for an unrelated issue and Fr. Gutierrez decided he should have it looked at by a doctor. At the hospital, however, an X-ray found nothing and he was told it was likely a pulled muscle. Returning to the seminary with just painkillers, he decided to take some advice from another seminarian who was a licensed chiropractor, and took up stretching to help with the supposed “pulled muscle,” as well as walking on crutches.
The problem is that stretching is the last thing one should do with a torn ACL and Fr. Gutierrez recalled how “really painful” it was when he performed the stretches. When the stretches didn’t work, Fr. Gutierrez sought an MRI scan, bearing the painful tear for nearly three weeks before he could get an appointment. It only took his doctor a couple of hours to call him back and explain that his ACL was torn and that he needed to undergo orthopedic surgery.
The day after his MRI was All Saints’ Day and Gutierrez found himself praying in the seminary chapel long after Mass had ended. Having spent the whole night worrying about his injury, he decided it was time to ask for “help from above,” and that’s when he suddenly felt the urge to pray a novena, something he had done many times before. When he considered whose intercession he should call on, he felt like he heard a whisper in his head suggesting Bl. Pier Giorgio Frassati.
Praying before the Blessed Sacrament and beside Bl. Pier Giorgio, Fr. Gutierrez explained to Angelus News, the seminarian did not request healing. Instead, he said, “My prayer was, ‘Lord, through the intercession of Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati, I ask you to help me in my injury.’”
In that moment, however, he also felt urged to add “…and I promise that, if anything unusual happens, I will report it to whomever I need to report it to.”
It was just a few days into his novena that he was praying in the chapel once more, but this time he felt a gentle heat in his ankle:
“It was gentle,” Gutierrez said. “But it would increase little by little, and at some point I thought that an outlet of the electrical was catching fire. And I was looking for the fire. And there was no fire there. So I just remember looking at my ankle and thinking, ‘That’s so strange’ because I could feel the warmth.”
Recognizing that many miraculous healings involve a sensation of heat, he began to weep before the tabernacle:
“I told the Lord in my heart, ‘It cannot be. Not because you don’t have the power to heal me, but because I know that I don’t have the faith for something like this.’ And that moved me.”
Before he even reached the ninth day of his novena, Fr. Gutierrez no longer needed to walk with crutches and by the time he went to his appointment with an orthopedic surgeon, he hadn’t even thought about the injury in days. When the surgeon examined his ankle, he was perplexed to not see any of the symptoms of a ligament tear, as were shown by his MRI:
“As of October 31, you had a tear in your Achilles, but now I can’t find it,” the doctor told the seminarian.
While this is the end of the miraculous occurrence that led to Fr. Gutierrez’s healing, it was practically another miracle in itself that we ever learned about it. A man who plays things close to the vest, Fr. Gutierrez hadn’t made a big fuss about his injury or his miraculous recovery, only confiding in his spiritual director and his closest friends.
He didn’t open up about the healing until he was in a class on the diocesan phase of canonization causes taught by Monsignor Robert Sarno, an American priest who had recently retired from the Vatican’s Dicastery of the Causes of the Saints. Fr. Gutierrez recalled that it took him most of the semester to build up the courage to talk to Monsignor Sarno, as the seminarian found the older priest intimidating.
Once told, however, Msgr. Sarno was immensely interested. He got the Vatican involved and started an investigation into a miracle that would wind up solidifying Bl. Pier Giorgio Frassati’s cause for canonization.
Msgr. Sarno told Angelus:
“It was the last thing that I had expected, that in this course that I was teaching in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, there could be a potential miracle for the canonization of Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati.”
And today we celebrate...