Hall of Fame baseball player Roberto Clemente is one step closer to becoming a saint, according to Christian Newswire, which reported late last month that Pope Francis officially declared the former Pittsburgh Pirate "blessed." With beatification, the Puerto Rican has just one step left to become a saint, according to the Catholic Church.
The pope's official blessing came after Clemente apparently met the requirement to perform a miracle. The alleged miracle happened last month when former Olympian Jamie Nieto, who once played Clemente in the film "Baseball's Last Hero," managed to walk again after a back-flip accident in April 2016 rendered the high jumper partially paralyzed from the neck down. His signature move during his competitive years more than a decade ago, Nieto tried to perform the move as a coach, but slipped and broke his neck.
Despite given a slim chance by doctors to regain enough strength and mobility in his legs to walk again, Nieto proved them wrong, the Associated Press reports. The Olympian took 130 nearly unaided steps at his wedding to Jamaican hurdler Shevon Stoddart. He had proposed to her while still in a wheelchair just six months after his accident.
While Nieto credited his recovery to his having "worked really hard," according to the AP, "Baseball's Last Hero" director Richard Rossi credited Nieto's "miracle" recovery to the spirit of Clemente. His proof, according to Christian Newswire, is docuмented in a letter he wrote last year to Pope Francis.
"In meditation, it was revealed to me that Roberto Clemente was a saint," Rossi wrote. "I saw a miracle healing of Jamie Nieto. He will walk at his own wedding to show the grace of the sacrament of marriage. Jesus performed his first miracle at the wedding of Cana."
According to Rossi, who began his campaign to make Clemente a saint in 2014, this is not the first miracle to occur in Clemente's name. Rossi also contends Clemente, a devout Catholic who died in 1972 while attempting to deliver aid to earthquake victims in Nicaragua, performed miracles while he was alive, as well. According to a Religion News Service article from 2014, Rossi and a group of volunteers spent time traveling to hear stories about Clemente and used scientific tools, medical records and other methods to try to verify Clemente's "miraculous healing touch."
To become canonized, potential saints need to show proof of at least two miracles. With the first one now apparently down, the world now must wait for the verification of a second.
Rossi did not immediately return The Washington Post's request to comment about what that next miracle may entail, but he showed enthusiasm for last month's news, tweeting Clemente's beatification essentially "greenlights [the player] for canonization."
http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/baseball/ct-roberto-clemente-closer-to-sainthood-20170817-story,amp.html

it would surely make a lot of catholic baseball fans happy :D 

APologies for the atrocious formatting.

 Pope Francis, who often laments current persecutions of Christians, has given the Catholic Church 35 new saints, nearly all of them martyrs, from past centuries.
The latest saints were proclaimed Sunday during a Mass celebrated by Francis in St. Peter's Square and attended by some 35,000 faithful, many of them pilgrims from the homelands of those being honored.
Thirty martyrs, including priests and lay persons, suffered anti-Catholic persecution in 1645 at the hands of Dutch Calvinists in Brazil, while three children, ages 12 and 13 who were indigenous persons in Mexico, were martyred in the 1520s for refusing to renounce their Catholic faith and return to their ancient traditions.
The other two new saints are a 20th-century priest from Spain and an Italian priest who died in 1739.
Since becoming pontiff in 2013, Francis has repeatedly paid tribute to Christians suffering or even dying for their faith in current times, especially in the Middle East.
At the end of the canonization ceremony, Francis hailed the new saints as "shining witnesses to the Gospel." In recent decades, the Church has stressed that the latest saints can serve as role models for today's Catholics.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/pope-adds-35-saints-church-nearly-martyrs-095042776.html

This does not sound like a miracle.

There are new physical therapy modalities that can help a paralyzed person to walk again if that person has determination, and it sounded like this person was highly motivated to walk again so he could walk at his wedding.

The last person hanged for witchcraft in Boston could be considered a Catholic martyr.
In the 1650s, Ann Glover and her family, along with some 50,000 other native Irish people, were enslaved by Englishman Oliver Cromwell during the occupation of Ireland and shipped to the island of Barbados, where they were sold as indentured servants.
What is known of her history is sporadic at best, though she was definitely Irish and definitely Catholic. According to an article in the Boston Globe, even Ann's real name remains a mystery, as indentured servants were often forced to take the names of their masters.
While in Barbados, Ann's husband was reportedly killed for refusing to renounce his Catholic faith. By 1680, Ann and her daughter had moved to Boston where Ann worked as a “goodwife” (a housekeeper and nanny) for the John Goodwin family.
Father Robert O'Grady, director of the Boston Catholic Directory for the Archdiocese of Boston, said that after working for the Goodwins for a few years, Ann Glover became sick, and the illness spread to four of the five Goodwin children.
“She was, unsurprisingly, not well-educated, and in working with the family, apparently she got sick at some point and the kids for whom she was primarily responsible caught whatever it was,” Fr. O'Grady told CNA.
A doctor allegedly concluded that “nothing but a hellish Witchcraft could be the origin of these maladies,” and one of the daughters confirmed the claim, saying she fell ill after an argument with Ann.
The infamous Reverend Cotton Mather, a Harvard graduate and one of the main perpetrators of witch trial hysteria at the time, insisted Ann Glover was a witch and brought her to what would be the last witch trial in Boston in 1688.
In the courtroom, Ann refused to speak English and instead answered questions in her native Irish Gaelic. In order to prove she was not a witch, Mather asked Ann to recite the Our Father, which she did, in a mix of Irish Gaelic and Latin because of her lack of education.
“Cotton Mather would have recognized some of it, because of course that would have been part of your studies in those days, you studied classical languages when you were preparing to be a minister, especially Latin and Greek,” Father O'Grady said.
“But because it was kind of mixed in with Irish Gaelic, it was then considered proof that she was possessed because she was mangling the Latin.”
Allegedly, Boston merchant Robert Calef, who knew Ann when she was alive, said she “was a despised, crazy, poor old woman, an Irish Catholic who was tried for afflicting the Goodwin children. Her behavior at her trial was like that of one distracted. They did her cruel. The proof against her was wholly deficient. The jury brought her guilty. She was hung. She died a Catholic."
Mather convicted Ann of being an “idolatrous Roman Catholick” and a witch, and she hung on Boston Common on November 16, 1688. Today, just a 15 minute walk away, the parish of Our Lady of Victories holds a plaque commemorating her martyrdom, which reads:
“Not far from here on 16 November 1688, Goodwife Ann Glover an elderly Irish widow, was hanged as a witch because she had refused to renounce her Catholic faith. Having been deported from her native Ireland to the Barbados with her husband, who died there because of his own loyalty to the Catholic faith, she came to Boston where she was living for at least six years before she was unjustly condemned to death. This memorial is erected to commemorate “Goody” Glover as the first Catholic martyr in Massachusetts.”
The plaque was placed at the Church on the tercentennial anniversary of her death in 1988 by the Order of Alhambra, a Catholic fraternity whose mission includes commemorating Catholic historical persons, places and events. The Boston City Council also declared November 16 as “Goody Glover Day,” in order to condemn the injustice brought against her. 
Ann Glover has not yet been officially declared a martyr by a pope, nor has her cause for canonization been opened to date, partly because her story has faded into obscurity over time, Fr. O’Grady said.
“Part of the dilemma here (too) is that when she was hanged, Catholics were a tiny, minuscule, minority in Boston, so picking up her ‘cause’ was not easy or ‘on top of the list’,” he said.
Ann Glover's trial also set the tone for the infamous Salem Witch Trials in 1692, during which 19 men and women were hanged for witchcraft, and in which Reverend Cotton Mather and his anti-Catholic prejudices played a major role.

https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/was-the-last-witch-of-boston-actually-a-catholic-martyr-27747