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"No Kill Date"

Venture Literary Sells the Miraculous Story of the Catholic Church’s Quest to Canonize the Eighth American Saint to Doubleday

On November 6, 2008, Frank R. Scatoni of Venture Literary sold World rights to Chasing Miracles by Bill Briggs to Charlie Conrad at Doubleday, a division of Random House.

On a raw January morning seven years ago, at a Catholic convent deep in the Indiana woods, a Baptist handyman named Phil McCord made an urgent plea to God. He was by no means a religious man; but he was a desperate man.

McCord’s damaged right eye had pulsed for months with a furious shade of red. Half blind, he had one shot at recovery: risky surgery that would replace part of his diseased eye with healthy tissue from a corpse. Dreading the grisly operation, McCord offered a prayer, a spontaneous and fumbling request to the long-deceased founder of the convent, Mother Theodore Guerin: Can you help me get through this? He merely hoped for inner peace, but when he awoke the next day, his eye was better, suddenly and shockingly better. No surgery. No medicine. And no doctor could rationally explain it.

The nuns who had hired McCord to care for their creaky convent quickly cheered his recovery as a moment of divine healing. But McCord wasn’t so sure. Why me? he asked. Of all the people and all the problems in the world, why me? Was this a gift from God? A miracle?

That’s what the Catholic Church and the Pope himself would have to decide. As part of an ancient and little-known process, top Catholic officials would convene a confidential tribunal to examine the handyman’s healing, to verify whether his recovery defied the laws of nature. They would formally summon McCord, his doctors, co-workers, and family to a windowless basement room in the Archdiocese of Indianapolis. They would appoint three local priests to serve the roles of judge, defense counsel, and prosecutor. They would question each witness and scour every page of medical records. They would put this alleged “miracle” on trial, all in an effort to determine if Mother Theodore Guerin had “interceded” on McCord’s behalf and, as a result, would be canonized the eighth American saint.

In Chasing Miracles: The Catholic Church’s Secret Trial to Canonize the Eighth American Saint, award-winning journalist and author Bill Briggs retraces the church investigation into this mysterious healing—a secret inquest that exposed the eternal clash between faith and science, that sought to prove the existence of God in the eye of a convent caretaker. Briggs has secured unprecedented access to the case and its players, offering a front-row seat inside the closed-door drama as doctors were grilled about the supernatural, as priests doggedly hunted for soft spots in the claim, and as McCord disclosed his long struggle to accept his new public persona as “the Miracle Man.”

Just as The Da Vinci Code served up a gripping, fictional tour through the darkest, least-known reaches of Roman Catholic ritual and history, Chasing Miracles treks through that same intriguing ground—ancient methods, sacred rules, apparitions, and healings—to take the reader on a journey to the heart of the Catholic faith. Simply put, Chasing Miracles is The Da Vinci Code meets CSI meets The Firm—except it’s all true.

Bill Briggs is the coauthor of Amped: A Soldier’s Race for Gold in the Shadow of War and has earned seven national awards for the Denver Post. He also works as a freelance writer, having sold sports and business stories to the Miami Herald, MSNBC.com, the Financial Times, and the Wall Street Journal.


To learn more about Venture Literary, visit: www.ventureliterary.com.
To learn more about Doubleday, visit: http://doubleday.com/