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ROSARIO, Argentina — They came by the thousands, praying for a miracle.

There was the 21-year-old woman who was paralyzed and intubated. The 66-year-old former truck driver who lost his voice two years ago. A 56-year-old who gradually lost his vision.

They rode buses from across the country, camped out overnight and waited in line for hours. Then, one by one, on crutches and in wheelchairs, holding babies and carrying photographs of relatives far away, they approached the woman they hoped would heal them.

At the front of a packed warehouse, 44-year-old Leda Bergonzi placed her hand on each of their foreheads and whispered into their ears. As she blessed them, some grabbed onto her, sobbing uncontrollably. Others collapsed into her arms or dropped onto the concrete floor. Members of her team stood by, ready to catch people as they fell.

“I told myself, I’ll go with all my faith and give it a try,” said Jorge Fernández, a 56-year-old former bricklayer who lost his vision after a traffic accident in 2019 and had traveled to Bergonzi’s ceremony for the sixth time. “Thanks to God and Leda’s touch, I started seeing again.”

Argentina has seen previous cases of charismatic priests attracting large crowds in search of healing, including here in Rosario, Argentina’s third largest city. But Bergonzi looks nothing like them. A lay person, she doesn’t wear robes or veils. She favors skinny jeans and high-top sneakers.

Sebastián López Brach

In the weekly programs, she sings alongside a band while speaking spontaneously in tongues, beneath bright, colorful lights. It’s a scene that would appear at home in an evangelical church, a movement that has rapidly gained ground in Latin America.

Bergonzi, though, is Catholic. She describes herself as an intermediary — an instrument for God.

And local Catholic leaders are fully behind her.

A priest keeps watchful vigil over her gatherings, which are preceded by a Mass and Eucharistic adoration. This fall, the archbishop of Rosario released a remarkable statement endorsing her, describing her as a “phenomenon occurring within the Catholic Church.”

Here in the home country of Pope Francis, where Catholicism is facing a steep decline, Bergonzi is giving people a reason to return to Mass.

The question is whether her movement can reconnect people to the Catholic Church — and keep them coming back.

About eight years ago, in a small Catholic prayer group, Bergonzi, a seamstress with five children and a granddaughter, realized she had a divine gift, she says — an ability to heal people through the Holy Spirit.

“I’m a normal person, just like you all, going through a call from God,” she said in an interview.

She began drawing followers, people who would come to her prayer group every Tuesday. As more and more people shared their testimonies, she began moving into bigger and bigger venues for her weekly ceremonies. Then, after a local news article about her circulated and word spread that soccer star Lionel Messi’s family attended one of her gatherings, her following exploded.

“In the past, a healing priest needed decades to become known,” said Diego Mauro, a historian and coordinator of the Observatory of Religious Cultures at the University of Rosario. “It could take a long time for news to reach Buenos Aires, but now, with social media and testimonial videos, it spreads like wildfire. Especially in a political and economic context with so little hope for the future.”

About 20,000 people have been showing up every week in Rosario, the city with the highest murder rate in the country and where gangs fight for control of the local drug trade. Arriving on “religious tourism” buses, the pilgrims pack the city’s hotels and restaurants. And on Tuesdays, they join a line about a mile-long in the hopes of being blessed by Bergonzi.

Juan José Calandra, a priest from a parish near Rosario who has been accompanying Bergonzi for years, estimates there are at least 10 to 15 “Ledas” in the country. In one of Rosario’s slums, a local priest, Father Ignacio, has drawn believers for many years now. In the late 1990s, the charismatic priest Mario Pantaleo conducted healing sessions in his parish in the Buenos Aires suburbs — and even reportedly helped former Argentine president Carlos Menem.

But no one has a following quite like Bergonzi’s, or an operation like the one behind her.

She is surrounded by a team of advisers, social media gurus, lawyers and former Argentine soccer stars, all helping to promote and protect her image. Her movement, called Soplo de Diós Viviente, or Breath of the Living God, now claims about 1,000 members in different WhatsApp groups and has been organizing visits to surrounding towns.

The team is also collecting medical studies from people who say they have been healed by Bergonzi and presenting them to the Catholic Church as part of a lengthy process that can result in the validation of a miracle or an official healing.

Bergonzi said she worries that her fandom will lead people to search for her, rather than for God. “The day that happens, I’ll run,” she said.

But the endorsement of local Catholic Church leaders has put her at ease, she said. She aims to help people find the spirituality they have been lacking in a church that has become, to a certain extent, “very conservative,” she said.

“To be in a church, what people need is that spirituality and that impactful encounter with God,” she said. “I always say this is a spirituality of impact.”

The Bergonzi phenomenon comes amid a crisis of faith among Argentina’s Catholics. According to a survey by pollster Latinobarómetro, just 49 percent of Argentines identified themselves as Catholic by 2020, compared with 76 percent a decade earlier. Similar declines can be seen in almost every country in Latin America, signaling the religion is losing its grip. Many people have instead turned to evangelical, particularly Pentecostal, churches.

<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/08/14/javier-milei-argentina-presidential-election/" target=_blank>Javier Milei</a>, the radical libertarian <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/11/19/argentina-presidential-election-results-javier-milei/" target=_blank>elected president of Argentina</a> last week, has referred to the pope as a “presence of evil.” Some of his associates have even floated the idea of breaking ties with the Vatican.

Argentina set for sharp right turn as Trump-like radical wins presidency

Some local Catholic leaders hope Bergonzi can help bring people back into the church.

“Many people who were estranged from Catholicism are now starting to participate once again,” said Calandra, the priest. “As the business saying goes, it’s better to retain a client than to acquire one. Let’s hope this has an influence.”

“In Catholicism, miracles are seen as something extraordinary and almost unattainable in life,” said Mauro, of the University of Rosario. “Phenomena like Leda’s serve to rekindle the enchantment within Catholicism, which has, to some extent, lost its luster.”

“Her own aesthetics help: a young, attractive woman with freshness, breaking all traditional molds of a healer priest in a cassock,” he added.

But some within Argentina’s Catholic Church worry the phenomenon could put too much of a focus on miracles — rather than on everyday faith.

Pablo Savoia, a priest at Our Lady of Mercy Parish in Buenos Aires and a frequent commentator on Catholicism, urged Catholics not to get carried away. He said the Church must “discern the veracity of this phenomenon.”

“Let us not be dazzled by spectacular gifts,” Savoia said.

Many of those waiting in line for Bergonzi admitted they had lost touch with the Catholic faith or had never felt much of a desire to go to church. It was unclear whether Bergonzi would manage to change that. For many, the priority — a desperate need for medical solutions — was far more urgent.

Abril Gutiérrez, a 19-year-old mother who camped out overnight with her toddler, said she believes in God but isn’t particularly devoted to Catholicism. She just came in the hopes that Bergonzi could heal her daughter.

Raul Costello, the 66-year-old truck driver, and his wife, Nancy Geist, came to try out “a bit of faith," she said.

“We are Catholics, but the truth is that we don’t go to church regularly,” Geist said. “Nowadays, you believe and don’t believe in these things. Some people reach you, and some don’t.”

But there was something about Bergonzi that felt sincere, she said.

“She has a charisma that draws you in,” she said. “She captures you.”

As her followers waited for their moment of impact, on a recent Tuesday afternoon, the line to reach Bergonzi stretched as much as a mile. Two warehouses — each with capacity for 1,300 people — were also packed. Many had been waiting for a full day or camping out on lawn chairs overnight.

For almost 12 hours straight, Bergonzi placed her hands on one person after another. She stopped only for short restroom breaks. She consumed only Gatorade and watermelon-flavored Halls lozenges.

The reactions, at times, were visceral: Some people cried out. Others seemed to convulse. One woman fainted with her child in her hands. The faintings were so frequent that Bergonzi sometimes stepped over people, collapsed on the floor, to reach the next person. In some cases, for privacy, she and her team would cover someone with a sheet bearing the image of Jesus.

She said she doesn’t remember or even register what she tells people. But she can usually tell, immediately, she said, if a person has been healed.

One of the first people in line was Nazarena Velazco, 21, who arrived at 4:30 a.m., after traveling five hours from the Cordoba province with her mother.

Complications from a surgery to a remove a brainstem tumor had left the young woman paralyzed on the left side of her body and unable to speak or eat on her own. She sat in a wheelchair, connected to a feeding tube. Around her neck was a photo of what she once looked like, surrounded by family at a birthday party.

The family is Catholic but “from home,” said her mother, Rosana Ocampo, 54. They hardly ever go to church.

She came to Bergonzi, she said, hoping the healer might help restore feeling in her daughter’s body.

When Bergonzi placed her hands on Velazco, the young woman’s body appeared to relax, Ocampo recounted. Velazco mouthed the words to her mother: “She is God.”

Ocampo was overwhelmed by a sense of peace. It was a strange sensation, she said.

“Something reached me,” Ocampo said, “something I needed.”

David Feliba

National Headliner Award, first place for news series, 2020 

NLGJA: The Association of LGBTQ Journalists, Excellence in Long Form Journalism Award, 2020

Indiana University, BA in journalism and Arabic 

Samantha Schmidt is The Washington Post's Bogotá bureau chief, covering all of Spanish-speaking South America. 

Samantha Schmidt

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Faith healer Leda Bergonzi is getting Argentine Catholics back to Mass

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Spiritual Healer Draws Crowds in Argentina

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A faith healer in skinny jeans is bringing Catholics back to Mass