At the end of July 1637, Miguel Juan Pellicer, a native of Calanda (Teruel, Spain) had an accident while working as a farmer. He fell to the ground and one of the wheels of his uncle’s cart ran over his right leg, breaking it spectacularly at about the ankle. They took him to the Valencia hospital and, seeing that he was getting worse and worse, they transferred him to Zaragoza where he arrived at the beginning of October, with a high fever and a totally gangrenous leg. Before entering the hospital he went to the Basilica del Pilar, where he confessed and received communion. He was then admitted and his leg was amputated four fingers below the knee in the Zaragoza public hospital. They sawed it off with no more anesthesia than a well-charged drink of alcohol while he entrusted himself to the Virgen del Pilar.
The attending surgeons got to work cauterizing the stump with a red-hot iron. The leg was buried, as was customary, in the hospital cemetery. At that time there was a strong spiritual sense by which it was considered that the body was destined for resurrection, as well as all its members, and that therefore the mutilated parts should be treated with respect, and not as a simple element of waste. For this reason, the hospital practitioner Juan Lorenzo García was commissioned to bury the leg “in a hole about 21 cm deep”, about 21 cm.
After leaving the hospital with a wooden leg and two crutches, Pellicer was forced, in order to survive, to go from the promising trade of farmer to one of the many beggars that existed at the time. He obtained the permission of the canons of Pilar to ask for alms at the door of the Sanctuary. Every morning Miguel Juan performed the same ritual. After attending the Eucharist in the so-called Holy Chapel, he would go to one of the lamps in the church, take some oil and rub his stump several times as a massage. He would go out into the street and stand at the door of the temple with the proof of his well-discovered misfortune, which aroused the compassion and sympathy of the nearly eight thousand people who came every day to visit Pilarica.
For a city as small as Zaragoza at that time, with a population barely reaching 25,000 people, it was not surprising that Pellicer, always placed on the main artery of circulation, such as El Pilar, with his stump in the air in a young and robust body, would attract attention and be known by almost all the inhabitants.
The young cripple decided one fine day to put an end to the hard life of a beggar that he had led for two years and five months, to go to his parents’ house in Calanda and try to redirect his existence with more dignity. Already in his home, on March 29, 1640, something extraordinary would happen that would later be described as a great miracle. Between ten and eleven at night, while he was sleeping peacefully, the right leg that had previously been amputated was suddenly and definitively replanted. He was dreaming that he was smearing his stump with the oil from the lamp of the Pilar church. After noticing “a fragrance and a soft smell never used to there”, the mother entered the room and approached her son with the lamp and saw that not one but both of her legs were coming out from between the sheets. It was the same amputated leg of his: with old scars as a child and the injury near the ankle that the car had caused when it ran over it. There was no growth of the leg, but a reimplantation of its member.
The commotion in the house infected the neighborhood and, logically, the entire town. There was no room for a pin in the Pellicers’ house. There was a festive riot.
Miguel Juan commented that when they woke him up he dreamed that “he was in the Chapel of Nuestra Señora del Pilar in Zaragoza, smearing his right leg with oil from a lamp, as he had used to do when he was there.”
Miguel Juan did not hesitate for a moment in attributing the reimplantation of his member to the intervention of Pilarica: “Before going to sleep I have truly entrusted myself to the Virgen del Pilar.” Two surgeons, Juan de Rivera and Jusepe Nebot, were the first doctors to certify, in the protagonist’s own home, that this extraordinary and unlikely event had no scientific explanation. In addition, it was verified that the leg buried in the cemetery of the Zaragoza hospital was no longer there.
The Archbishop of Zaragoza, Don Pedro de Apaolaza, formally opened the Miracle Investigation Process two months and a week after the event. His concern for transparency made the Trial public and the transcript of all the interrogations, objections, deductions and other testimonies were published quickly, and in the vulgar language, that is, Spanish, so that the entire population had direct access to it. these investigations, being able to intervene in it to clarify or contradict data or testimonies.
On April 27, 1641, the Archbishop of Zaragoza signed the sentence: “We declare that Miguel Juan Pellicer, who is the subject of this Process, has miraculously been restored to his right leg, which had previously been cut off; and that it had not been the work of nature, but that he has worked prodigiously and miraculously; and that it has to be judged and considered a miracle because all the conditions that must be present for the essence of a true miracle are present…”.
The miracle was quickly disclosed by the Court, and Miguel Juan was received in Madrid by King Felipe IV. A Spanish account of the Miracle, made in 1641 by the Carmelite Fr. Jerónimo de San José and later translated into Italian, spread the news throughout Spain, Italy and the South of France. Above all, a Latin Relationship, written by the German doctor Pedro Neurath in 1642, later translated into French, German and Dutch, spread it throughout Europe. Pope Urban VIII himself was personally informed by the Jesuit from Aragon F. Franco in 1642.
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