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Man's miraculous recovery leads priest to sainthood

IT DOESN'T TAKE a brain surgeon to make a man a saint in the Roman Catholic Church. But it definitely helps.

William Glisson Jr. of Delaware County, center, whose cure from a 2002 head injury was declared the miracle needed to canonize Rev. Luigi Guanella, holds a shrine with the relics of Rev. Guanella, during a mass celebrated by pope Benedict XVI on Sunday. (AP Photo/Osservatore Romano, HO)
William Glisson Jr. of Delaware County, center, whose cure from a 2002 head injury was declared the miracle needed to canonize Rev. Luigi Guanella, holds a shrine with the relics of Rev. Guanella, during a mass celebrated by pope Benedict XVI on Sunday. (AP Photo/Osservatore Romano, HO)Read more
    by BY WILLIAM BENDER, <a href="mailto:benderw@phillynews.com">benderw@phillynews.com</a> 215-854-5255
    Published 

IT DOESN'T TAKE a brain surgeon to make a man a saint in the Roman Catholic Church.

But it definitely helps.

Yesterday, Pope Benedict XVI approved the canonization of the Rev. Luigi Guanella after church officials concluded that prayers to the 19th-century Italian priest led to the miraculous recovery of William "Billy" Glisson Jr., who suffered a brutal head injury while rollerblading in Delaware County in 2002.

Without the testimony of Dr. Richard Buonocore, the neurosurgeon who operated on Glisson at Crozer Chester Medical Center, the recovery might not have been attributed to Guanella - a requirement for sainthood.

"I put it this way: Throughout the whole process there was divine intervention," Buonocore told the Daily News yesterday, after thousands of Catholics attended Sunday Mass in St. Peter's Square in Vatican City, where Pope Benedict named Guanella a saint.

Buonocore said that Glisson, then 21, suffered the worst head injury he's ever seen. Glisson was expected to remain in a coma or on life support - if he even lived at all.

A family friend gave Glisson's mother a Guanella bone relic that was placed in Glisson's hospital wristband, and they prayed to the priest. Glisson bounced back and returned to work at his family's roofing-and-insulation company in Folcroft within seven months.

The Vatican later deemed it a miracle.

"You can't really make any sense but to call what happened to me a miracle," Glisson, of Edgmont, told the Inquirer last week. He was in Vatican City yesterday for Guanella's ceremony and could not be reached for comment.

Buonocore, 50, of Newtown Square, agrees with his former patient's assertion.

"There was nothing else I could do," the surgeon said. "I had more than exhausted my ability for surgical intervention. I thought he was going to be in a persistent vegetative state and wouldn't wake up."

Glisson, 30, is now married and working at the family business on Chester Pike.

Meanwhile, Buonocore doesn't consider himself a miracle worker, but can't help but take pride in being part of a miracle.

"I'm gratified he's doing well," he said. "There was divine intervention through me. I just facilitated it. This is the stuff that gives me hope in the middle of the night when I'm working on other patients."

- The Associated Press contributed to this report.