NBC 10 Investigates Miracle

I know the NBC 10 investigators are good, but are they good enough to investigate a miracle from St. John Neumann? Yes, that’s what Lu Ann Cahn did the other night during a nearly five-minute piece: Investigate a miracle.

A woman has cancer, her husband just happens to be a previously-featured-on-NBC 10-forensic sculptor, he makes a new mask for St. John Neumann, a priest does some prayin’ and — wham! — no more cancer. These people aren’t religious, of course, and they don’t say “yes” when Cahn asks them if they’re going to go back to church. Score one for the nonreligious!

“Was there divine intervention?” Cahn asks, but NBC 10 can’t get comments from her doctors, who are all Know-Nothings. But everyone interviewed said it’s clearly a miracle, and Neumann will totally get another notch on his sainthood belt for this one. Video after the jump.

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Pope Disses Philly

Sometime next year, the pope will hit the United States to plug his new album or something. It’ll be Pope Benedict XVI’s first visit to the States since he became pope.

Benedict will be hitting New York, obviously, as well as Washington, D.C., but apparently he’s not going to be driving his popemobile around Philadelphia. KYW 1060 reports the pope’s itinerary — which includes speaking at the UN and visiting the White House and Ground Zero — does not include Philly.

Geeze, what more do we have to do? (Okay, sustain a population or still be the nation’s capital, I assume.) We have one quarter of the American saints and we can’t get a simple papal visit?

On the plus side, we can actually go check to see if St. John Neumann is rolling over in his grave.

Heroic Dog Who Evaded German Hit Immortalized At Atwater Kent Museum

Apparently hoping to capitalize on the success of the shrine of St. John Neumann, Philadelphia’s underrated Atwater Kent Museum has brought in its own preserved body for watchers to gawk at: Philly The Doggy.

The museum’s website explains (emphasis, underlining and bolding all mine):

Philly, World War I mascot of “Philadelphia’s own,” 315th Infantry Regiment, U.S. Army, 1932. See Philly in the exhibition, Wartime: Illustrations by Norman Rockwell, May 24-October 6, 2006. The dog Philly was a good luck charm and decorated veteran with the 315th Infantry Regiment, known as “Philadelphia’s own,” when it fought in France during World War I. Philly was enlisted as a stray when a member of the 315th picked her up while the troops were training in Maryland, named her Philly, and smuggled her on a troop transport to France. Philly lived in the trenches and on sentinel duty barked at night whenever German troops began their attacks. A German commander went so far as to place a bounty on her head. Philly received two honorary Bronze stars, one for a mustard gas attack and one for a shrapnel wound. At war’s end she returned to the United States with the troops and marched in the victory parade in Washington, D.C., in front of President Woodrow Wilson. Philly lived until 1932 in Philadelphia and attended annual regimental reunions, where her favorite foods were liver and cake. In 1998, when the 315th was eliminated in military downsizing, Philly was donated by the regiment to the Philadelphia City History Collection at AKMP.

Move over, Snoopy: This guy is the coolest effing dog ever. Could you see any of today’s prissy, yip-yip dogs getting Bronze stars or warning the troops of oncoming Germans insurgents? I think not. You’re our hero, Philly.

Featured Philadelphians [Atwater Kent Museum]
Saint’s Body/Relics [Shine of St. John Neumann]