Twenty weeks into her pregnancy, in February 2015, Michelle Schachle and her husband Daniel were told their baby would not survive. An ultrasound had revealed severe fluid buildup that risked harming Michelle, too. Doctors at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center recommended terminating the pregnancy. For the devoutly Catholic couple, abortion was off the table. The suggestion angered Dan. “It’s my job to protect my children, not to kill them,” he recalls thinking. The Schachles made worst-case plans to bury the baby in their yard, in rural Tennessee. And they began to pray.
They prayed for Father Michael McGivney, a nineteenth-century Connecticut priest, to press God to intervene on the fetus’s behalf. In 1882, McGivney founded the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic men’s organization that sells life insurance. Inspired by McGivney, Dan had found his calling as an insurance agent for the Knights, and his sales won him and Michelle spots on a 2015 reward trip to Europe. It came at an opportune time. The couple prayed for McGivney’s aid at the Vatican, and again at the Sanctuary of Fátima, a popular pilgrimage site in Portugal, where they heard a gospel reading in which Jesus tells a nobleman whose son is sick: “You may go; your son will live.”
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