Two years after his death, Pope John Paul II has taken his first firm step on the road to sainthood, thanks to the apparently miraculous recovery from Parkinson’s Disease of Sister Marie-Simon-Pierre, a ‘quiet little nun’ from Aix-en-Provence.

Sister Marie, one of five children of a Roman Catholic family originally from northern France, had been suffering from this degenerative disease of the nervous system for four years and had already written a largely illegible letter to the late Pope when, on 2 June 2005, she prayed again to John Paul. She suddenly lost all signs of the illness and was able to write a second, entirely comprehensible letter on the morning of the miracle. ‘It was like being born again’, said Sister Marie-Simon-Pierre, who has been working in a maternity hospital in Paris since November 2006.

Under the rules of the Church, reliable evidence of one posthumous miracle is enough to earn Pope John Paul a beatification, the official recognition of a person’s ascension into Heaven. Two such miracles are required to grant him sainthood. To qualify as a miracle, any cure has to be sudden, complete and permanent — as well as having no medical explanation.

John Paul II was singled out for potential canonisation by his successor, Benedict XVI, who waived the customary five-year waiting period for the beatification process to commence. With 130 cases of possible miracles attributable to John Paul under consideration, most Church experts regard his elevation to sainthood as almost inevitable and that it could even be confirmed on the third or fourth anniversary of his death.

A correspondent for one leading French newspaper, who asked not to be identified, said that the media in France would not devote much time to questioning either the evidence or the process because it was not felt politic to do so. The correspondent added that most rational people, whether or not they were practising Roman Catholics, were quite prepared to accept sudden recovery from illnesses for which there is no known cure, recovery that defies any rational explanation. “However, to attribute it to the intervention of someone already dead requires a leap of faith that, if the truth be told, is beyond most of us. The media will keep their heads below the parapet because they know they will not be thanked for asking awkward questions.”