The Mother of God brings healing to a child — and touches the heart of a family.
When Eric and Andrea Paul took their newborn baby Bruce, born in September 2022, for his early checkups, the pediatrician found a persistent heart murmur. An echocardiogram revealed the baby had a large hole in his heart that required surgery.
“I had faith that God wanted this to happen for a reason,” Andrea recalled to the Register. “Without the surgery, he wouldn’t have lived. He would eventually die from congestive heart failure.”
From their home in southwestern Alaska, Andrea flew to C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital in Michigan for the baby’s open-heart surgery in February 2023. Eric, who was in the Air Force, had to remain stationed in Alaska.
Bruce was not yet 6 months old. During the operation, doctors found a second hole. They also discovered the baby’s mitral valve was “not seating correctly, as his heart was stretched beyond self-repair of the valve,” Eric explained, and Bruce would need another open-heart surgery when he was 6 or 7; otherwise, he would die of congestive heart failure.
A year later, there was no improvement in his condition.
At this time, “I was beginning my walk with the Catholic Church,” Eric said. He had been raised Protestant and was taught to be suspicious of Catholics. “In that walk I recognized the power that Christ gave to relics of the saints.” In the personal studies Eric was doing, he came across the podcast The Exorcist Files, with Father Carlos Martins, head of Treasures of the Church, and heard him speak on “why relics are scripturally sound theology and why they work, essentially to bring people to Christ. He talked about the arm of St. Jude traveling through the United States.”
Eric wanted Andrea to fly to Oklahoma, stay with his parents and await St. Jude’s arm coming to Oklahoma City. That proved unworkable for an infant who had undergone open-heart surgery. “Obviously, God didn’t have it in store for us to go to Jude,” Eric said. But he had a “nagging feeling,” he said, “like I’m being called to do something; no words, no visions, nothing spectacular, just a nagging. “
It was then that Andrea’s sister Natalie Neff, who lives with her husband Dalton and their children near the Pauls, came across an article from their diocesan paper, North Star Catholic, about an Our Lady of Beauraing statue only an hour’s drive north. Natalie, also Bruce’s godmother, told Eric “about the Marian apparitions in Beauraing, Belgium, how Our Lady touched a hawthorn tree there, how a World War II soldier brought home a piece of that very tree and his deathly ill son was miraculously healed.”
Father Madison Hayes, who baptized Bruce two months after he was assigned to three parishes and two missions in this area, shared the story about the four-foot statue of Our Lady of Beauraing on the grounds of St. Bernard Catholic Church in Talkeetna, which is at the foot Mount Denali, the tallest peak in North America. The statue was brought there in the 1980s by the pastor, but its story remained a mystery for 25 years until a priest on a visit could share the history.
This replica of Our Lady of Beauraing was one of several made in Minnesota in 1955 after World War II by U.S. soldier George Herter who had married a Belgian woman. Father Hayes explained, “After the war, their son was among 70 children coming to America by ship. All the children were stricken with typhus. His mother, who had a piece of the hawthorn tree from Beauraing, placed it under the boy’s pillow. He was healed. The other children died. In gratitude for his son’s miraculous recovery, Herter made the statues and placed a splinter from Our Lady’s hawthorn tree in each of the replicas.” One still known was in Talkeetna.
“I definitely believe that this was Mary extending her motherly love to me and our family,” Natalie recalled, explaining that the family wanted to pray that “Mary would intercede for Bruce to be healed, as she did for the soldier’s little boy.”
Eric immediately decided, “We’ve got to go as a family. It’s got to be the whole family” — so he, Andrea, Bruce, Natalie and Dalton, Eric’s best friend, plus the Pauls’ two dogs, hit the road.
“Mary was a huge topic of controversy with me because, growing up, Protestants don’t venerate Mary. They look at her as a blessed woman who was a vehicle for God’s will. And that’s it,” Eric explained.
But because of all his studying of the Catholic faith, Eric “definitely did not discredit” the intercession of Mary and looked forward to their faith-filled journey.
At the Shrine
“I remember everything was quiet and peaceful,” Eric said of their pilgrimage, which included prayers before the Marian statue outside. “As a family, we knelt in front of Mary and asked for her intercession and told her the circumstances and how we are just asking Christ to make our little boy okay and not have to undergo yet another heart surgery. I was praying fervently with the rest of the family, on my knees.”
Andrea described how “Bruce touched the heart on her statue, and you could just really feel like she was there with us. That was really miraculous just in itself.”
“Bruce was touching the heart and not being prompted,” seconded Eric. “We didn’t put his hand on it. He just was touching it for a [long] time for a toddler. He was enthralled with this heart. … It felt like she was standing there.”
The family’s experience links back to the Beauraing apparitions. Mary revealed her heart, illuminated like a heart of gold surrounded by great rays. Thus, she is also known as the “Virgin with the Golden Heart.”
“First thing I said was, ‘Praise Jesus and Hail Mary,’” emphasized Eric. “Everything worked out exactly to God’s will.”
He remembers a gradual buildup of things feeling different. Then the dogs began acting unusually. The older canine jumped up on the statue’s base and was looking straight at Our Lady “like he does when he greets you when you pull into the drive. He knows what a person is versus a statue. He doesn’t jump up on statues. I thought, ‘What is going on?’”
Andrea admitted to being a bit skeptical and “didn’t have the faith that I should have at first,” she said. “But then when we went and we prayed and we stood by the statue, and the dogs started acting like how they were, and Bear, our older dog, acted like she [Our Lady] was there and was saying ‘Hi’ to her,” she added, “I felt her presence, and it was just really miraculous. My faith obviously changed at that moment.”
Surprisingly, the two dogs started “gardening” around the statue. They began ripping out the local plant called devil's club, which is full of sharp thorns. They did not stop until they cleared it all from around the statue. Andrea checked their mouths to see if they were hurt, but they were fine.
“We concluded they knew the Queen of Heaven and Earth was present,” Natalie Neff recounted.
Post-Pilgrimage
Bruce’s “loud and clear” murmur was gone after praying at the Shrine of Our Lady of Beauraing. Next exam, same results.
“Praise God, and thank you, Mary!” Eric said. Bruce is set to have an echocardiogram in March 2025, “where we will be able to visibly see Christ’s healing powers with our own eyes and have concrete evidence of this miracle. … His heart is working well now. He’s sprinting around and always on the move.”
Andrea felt “he’s healed” but at the same time admits to “being like the apostle Thomas” and is looking forward to seeing the echocardiogram next year.
Eric said he now sees “exactly why God did not allow us to go to St. Jude and sent us to Mary, because of my outlook on her in the past. Now I see how much more grace came from her. She brought me to her to say, ‘I forgive what you said,’ almost in a way. ‘I’m going to intercede for your son.’”
Andrea also believes there is “definitely a connection between the story of the World War II soldier, especially because Eric is in the military. I was in the military, the Air Force, too.”
“From the healing of a soldier’s son after World War II to the healing of an airman’s son in today’s world, the intercession of Our Lady of Beauraing continues to be a powerful sign of great hope,” Father Hayes told the Register. “But this touching story of Our Lady with the Golden Heart is not quite finished. Remember that the message of Our Lady was to ‘convert sinners.’”
Said Father Hayes of Eric: “It literally took a miracle to open his heart to the truth, beauty and goodness of Catholicism.” Eric is now officially a member of the OCIA group at Our Lady of the Lake in Big Lake, Alaska, “and will enter full communion with the Church this upcoming Easter, God willing.”
“Conversion is at the heart of every apparition of Mary. To Jesus, through Mary,” Father Hayes added. “If the physical healing of Bruce is indeed a miracle, the still greater miracle is the spiritual healing of his father Eric and his coming into full communion with the Catholic Church.”
Growing closer to our Blessed Mother individually and as a family has been a blessing indeed.
“We both have grown closer,” Andrea said of her experience as well as Eric’s, adding that their closeness to Mary continues. “We pray to her a lot.” Eric wears the Miraculous Medal and says the Rosary. Andrea continued, “We both wear her scapular. We talk about her quite often. We pray to her. I always say Our Father and Hail Marys at night with Bruce. I’ve said Rosaries. I need to say more of them. I definitely believe in Mother Mary and her work, so I don’t know why I was skeptical at first.”
Added Eric, “It’s only drawn me deeper.”
Andrea advises parents faced with trials, “Definitely with every decision, make sure to pray about it first. Definitely have faith in the power of God and these relics that are very strong. Believe and have a strong faith God will take care of you.”