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"I'm certain that inside of me there was the hand of God operating, thanks to the intercession of Pope Pius XII," Esposito said during a recent interview in her cheery dining room in the seaside town of Castellammare di Stabia on the Amalfi coast. "I'm convinced of it."

Doctors and church officials aren't so sure.

Esposito's local bishop, Monsignor Felice Cece, summoned Esposito earlier this year to testify about her recovery to determine if indeed it was medically inexplicable, one of the key thresholds required by the Vatican to determine if a miracle occurred.

After consulting two outside doctors, Cece determined that Esposito could have been cured by even a single cycle of chemo and essentially closed the case.

But Esposito's supporters, led by Marchione, have gone over the bishop's head and are sending her full medical file directly to the Vatican's saint-making office for review.

"I was saved. I thank the Lord," said Esposito. "If he did something for me, then I now want to do something for him."
The Rev. Peter Gumpel, the Jesuit historian who has spearheaded Pius' saint-making cause for some two decades, said the case was under consideration but was noncommittal.

"We are at the very first preliminary stages of pre-investigation, and we are not even sure whether it will go ahead," he said, stressing that regardless the process is still years away from fruition.

The Vatican's saint-making process has long been subject to skeptics' doubts.

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Despite opposition, Pius' cause is progressing at an impressive clip amid an increasingly concerted effort by Benedict and Pius' supporters to highlight his virtues and discredit his naysayers. A museum is planned in his honor, as are conferences and exhibits.

The Vatican's newspaper, Pius' chief cheerleader, recently ran an article about how Pius had Jews sheltered in convents around Rome during the Nazi occupation. A Vatican-sponsored film festival in May screened three glowing films about his papacy. Benedict himself recently extolled Pius as a hero during the war, saying he'd earned the "everlasting gratitude" of its victims.

Jewish groups and historians have argued for years that the Vatican had no business moving forward with Pius' beatification cause until the Vatican's full secret archive of his papacy is opened to scholars for independent research. That process is expected to take several more years.

"My position has always been to say — and I've said it to Pope Benedict XVI — that this is a matter that should be deferred until at least the generation of Holocaust survivors is no longer with us, so it's not as if rubbing the salt into their wounds," said Rabbi David Rosen, head of interfaith relations at the American Jewish Committee.

Last year, 19 Catholic scholars appealed to the academic in Benedict to give researchers more time to study the full archives. "The question isn't 'Did he do anything?' but whether he might have done more or sooner," said the Rev. John Pawlikowski, ethics professor at the Catholic Theologcial Union who co-wrote the letter.

Pius' supporters, however, are getting impatient. They charge that few scholars ever consult the 11 volumes of World War II archives that have already been released and put online, along with thousands of other documents, by a foundation headed by a Long Island Jew who admires Pius.

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Her husband, Umberto di Maio, said the family had been praying to John Paul II, who had died just a few months before, when Esposito was diagnosed in July 2005. But as di Maio recounts it, John Paul appeared to him in a dream one night and said he couldn't help Esposito but showed a photo of a slim, bespectacled prelate who could.

Di Maio said he wasn't able to identify the priest until he saw Pius on the cover of a Catholic magazine a week later. As soon as he did, the family began fervently praying to Pius.

The family became convinced of Pius' intervention when Esposito's case was referred to a cancer specialist in Rome, an atheist who, after reviewing her charts, asked the family if they believed in God.

When di Maio replied they did, the doctor said: "Then pray, because she needs it," di Maio recounted.

Esposito, who still keeps the same dog-eared photocopy of Pius in her book of prayers, says she and her doctors were stunned when her PET scan, which detects lingering traces of cancer, came out clean after her six-week chemo cycle at the Umberto I hospital in the southern city of Nocera, near Salerno.

Her doctor, she said, was flabbergasted: "'Do you see this? It's clean! How is it possible?'" Esposito recalled Dr. Alfonso Maria D'Arco, head of oncology and hematology at Umberto I, as saying.

"And spontaneously I said to him, 'Doctor, doctor, isn't it possible that it came from above?" she said, pointing heavenward.

"No, no, no. Don't say shocking things," she said he responded.

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