Mystery Priest at Crash Site

The story:

The sketch:

The strangest part of this whole thing for me is the man is universally reported to have been a Catholic priest, and yet the only two possibilities appearing in all the reporting are either he was a priest at the right place at the right time or he was an angel appearing as a priest. While both those are true possibilities, did it never occur to anyone to mention that according to Catholicism, he may very well have been a saint from heaven? Bueller? Bueller?

Funnily enough, you do get some such suggestion from The Blaze, but I don't know why on earth they fixated on Padre Pio. 

Cause Padre Pio has a beard when he appears and wears his Capuchin habit.   Excerpts:

...A woman from St. Madeline’s in Ridley Park, gave her five prayer cards for people who were in the process of beatification and needed a miracle. Every day after Mass, she and her mother would go to the hospital and pray the rosary over Paul, then say the five prayers. “Whenever I came to the Padre Pio prayer, Paul blessed himself, even though he was totally unconscious,” Betty said.

Several people witnessed the phenomena, including a few nurses. Betty decided to call a local group of Padre Pio devotees and report what was happening. They decided to send someone to the hospital with one of the gloves worn by Padre Pio over the bloody stigmata wounds in his hands. On Monday, March 12, Paul was blessed with the relic and within days, one of his many serious ailments had miraculously vanished.

Betty called the group again and on April 6, 1984, the glove was once again brought to Paul and laid on his head. “I knew immediately something happened because it was like an electric shock went through him,” Betty said. “He opened his eyes and looked around the room, very clear-eyed. Then he fell back into the coma again but I just knew something had happened.”

She was right. The next day, when she returned to the hospital she was shocked to find her son sitting in a chair and watching television. He turned and said “Hi Mom.”

The nurse rushed in and told Betty: “He’s been talking all day!” When she called the neurosurgeon to tell him Paul Walsh was talking, the doctor said, “It’s not possible’ and hung up on her.”

But it was true. “They gave Paul another cat scan and all the doctor kept saying was, ‘I don’t believe this. I don’t’ believe this.’ The frontal lobe of his brain wasn’t smashed anymore.”

Even more inexplicable was what happened days later, on Easter Sunday morning, when Paul and his roommate woke up to find a man standing at the foot of Paul’s bed. Described as “an old priest in a brown robe,” Paul thought it was Betty’s brother, Charley, who bears a remarkable resemblance to Padre Pio.

“I remember being very certain that my Uncle Charley had been in to visit me,” Paul said. “I did see him. He was very happy and smiled at me. And then he left the room.”

Betty knew it couldn’t have been Charley because he lives in Boston. She folded up a picture of Padre Pio, hiding the name, and showed it to Paul. “That’s who visited me,” he said. “Isn’t that Uncle Charley?”

Weeks later, Paul Walsh walked out of Crozier Chester Medical Center, completely healed...

More awesome in the above story at the original link.  There are tons more stories about Padre Pio, both during his life and after his death, so I suppose turning immediately to him as an explanation made a little sense, but it's not as though we've had any shortage of holy priests these past 2000 years who might be answering prayers as God's delegates sent from heaven.  Honestly, ask a Catholic!