A Boy Was Born Without A Pulse. The Doctors Worked For 61 Minutes And Were About To Call Time Of Death. Then His Heart Started. The Vatican Investigated For Nine Years.
On the 16th of September, 2010, in a house near Peoria, Illinois, a boy was born dead. No pulse. No breath. For sixty one minutes, machines and hands and adrenaline could not change that. What happened in the sixty second minute took the Vatican nine years to rule on.
His parents, Travis and Bonnie Engstrom, had already chosen his name months before: James Fulton, after Fulton Sheen, the Illinois farm boy who became the most famous Catholic broadcaster in America. The birth was a planned home delivery, and it went wrong in a way no one could see: a knot in the umbilical cord, pulled tight. James arrived silent, blue, and still. His mother lay watching as the midwife began compressions on a chest the size of a fist, and, having nothing else to give, the family began repeating the name they had chosen: Fulton Sheen. The ambulance took twenty minutes to arrive. The compressions never stopped, in the house, in the ambulance, and in the hospital, where the monitors showed a flatline with a technical name: pulseless electrical activity. The team pushed epinephrine once, then twice. Nothing. An hour after his birth, the physicians began to step back from the table to declare the time of death.
And then the monitor picked up a heartbeat. Not a flutter: a hundred and forty eight beats per minute, the strong, ordinary rhythm of a healthy newborn, sixty one minutes in. The doctors' relief came braced with warnings. A brain starved for an hour does not come back whole. The family should expect blindness, feeding tubes, profound impairment. James went home, and month by month, hit every milestone a healthy child hits. No damage was ever found.
The Diocese of Peoria investigated for years, and in March 2014 a panel of physicians appointed by the Vatican's Congregation for the Causes of Saints reached a unanimous finding: no natural explanation. In July 2019, Pope Francis formally approved the recovery as a miracle attributed to Fulton Sheen. James Fulton Engstrom, meanwhile, grew up riding bikes and annoying his sisters, entirely unaware for years that he was a Vatican case file. The timeline is documented, minute by minute. The explanation is the open question. Sixty one minutes is a long time to be dead.
Witnessed. Subscribe.