A Boy's Heart Clot Vanished as a Priest Said Mass for Him in Rome

Around noon on Oct. 22, 2025, Sara Kronholz, a theology teacher and mother from Ohio, and her husband walked to meet their son's surgeon in a Cleveland hospital waiting room. Seven-year-old Anthony, who was born with half a working heart, had been put to sleep for a heart procedure to deal with a blood clot. The surgeon came out with an odd report: there was nothing there.

That result capped more than a year of worry. At a routine heart checkup in late 2024, doctors had spotted a clot flapping inside Anthony's Fontan, an extra tube surgeons had added in his third open-heart operation to route blood to his lungs. Blood thinners did not clear it, and by August 2025 the flow around it was weakening. Doctors scheduled a cardiac catheterization, in which a camera thinner than a needle tip is threaded through a vein in the groin to see and treat the problem, for Oct. 22.

A check on Oct. 14 showed the clot still looked the same. The night before the procedure, Sara asked her pastor, Father Andrew, to pray with her. They asked for help from Mary under the title Our Lady of Lourdes, and Sara said they invoked "St. Joseph, St. Therese, St. Anthony" and St. John Paul II, whose annual feast day in the Catholic calendar falls on Oct. 22. On the morning of the operation, Sara put her hand on Anthony's chest to bless him and felt warmth, and imagined those saints in the room.

In the operating room, doctors first did an ultrasound from outside the body and saw no clot. Then they went inside with the catheter to double-check, found nothing to fix, and closed the small entry point. Sara laughed with relief. The doctor joked that perhaps the blood thinner had finally worked after 14 months, while Sara said she saw the timing as the way God chose to show his power.

She did not yet know what was happening 4,500 miles away. While she waited, she texted her sister Maria for prayers. Maria knew something Sara did not: Father Joe, a Catholic priest who knows the family, was in Rome at the end of a pilgrimage and had been asked to pray for Anthony through John Paul II.

Father Joe had been assigned, with no special request, to a small church two blocks from his hotel, the Church of Saints Marcellinus and Peter. Inside he saw, as Father Joe put it, "a picture of John Paul II celebrating Mass in that church." Speaking broken Italian to a pastor who spoke almost no English, he got permission to use the same older high altar shown in the photo. In the sacristy, the pastor stopped the assistant, whispered in Italian, and had another robe brought out, the ornate vestment John Paul wore in the picture. Then, Father Joe said, the assistant pulled another cup and plate from the safe, the chalice and paten the late pope had given the parish during a visit in 1989, according to a note kept with them.

Father Joe celebrated Mass in that robe and with that chalice from 6 to 7 p.m. Rome time. Because Rome is six hours ahead of Cleveland, that was the same noon hour when Sara and her husband were waiting. Only later did they learn that the little church also held a shrine to St. Therese on one side, a painting of St. Joseph on the other, and a side chapel for Our Lady of Lourdes, the same saints Sara had named the night before.