Before Pope John Paul II was elevated to sainthood, someone had to be the bad guy in Costa Rica and oppose his canonization. That contentious responsibility was accepted by Dr. Mariano Ramirez, a 79-year old oncologist and gynecologist who became the devil’s advocate against John Paul the Great and his entry into the Holy Canon.

According to daily tabloid La Teja, the idea of playing the devil’s advocate had never occurred to Dr. Ramirez, but his fate was sealed in the eleventh hour of the investigation conducted in Costa Rica into the miraculous healing of Floribeth Mora, a woman who unexpectedly recovered from a terminal brain aneurysm in 2011.

Earlier this year, investigators from the Vatican arrived in Costa Rica to look into the case of the miraculous recovery of Mrs. Mora, who was in her late 40s when she was ready to give up the ghost after being diagnosed with a massive brain aneurysm deemed inoperable by specialists across Latin America and Spain. On the day that the beatification of Pope John Paul II was taking place due to earlier miracles attributed to his intercession, Mrs. Mora felt that the good soul of the late Pope was urging her to set aside her fears. The massive headaches caused by her hemorrhaging brain all of a sudden went away, and a medical exam later revealed that her aneurysm had somehow vanished.

When the Vatican investigators arrived in Costa Rica, they did not have a devil’s advocate -someone who can formulate a strong and skeptical argument against canonization; particularly when it comes to analyzing miracles. Although the Vatican requires a devil’s advocate as part of the canonization process, Pope John Paul II actually abolished that full-time position. During his papacy, 483 saints were canonized; such a workload could not have been handled by a single devil’s advocate, and thus each case is assigned its own skeptic.

The task of finding a devil’s advocate in Costa Rica fell upon the Chancellor of the Metropolitan Curia of San Jose. He already had a physician in mind, but the one he chose was too busy pulling double shifts for La Caja (Costa Rica’s public health system). A priest familiar with the investigation arrived at a clinic where Dr. Ramirez happened to be visiting; the two men struck up a casual conversation in which it was mentioned that the Tico physician is Roman Catholic and fluent in Italian -a miracle find, so to speak.

It took 15 days of investigation and questioning the facts surrounding the miracle recovery of Mrs. Mora for Dr. Ramirez to admit that the sudden disappearance of her aneurysm could not be medically explained. He doubted all medical exams and every piece of information in the case; it was his job to do so. It is not unusual for a Roman Catholic to play devil’s advocate; in fact, they are preferred in many cases since they are familiar with doctrine and dogma. When the late English author and thinker Christopher Hitchens was called in to play devil’s advocate against Mother Theresa of Calcutta, his knowledge of theology helped him more than his staunch atheism.

If there is something that the beatification and canonization of Pope John Paul II have taught us is that devil’s advocates are nothing like the shadowy figures of novelist Dan Brown’s world of Angels and Demons or The Da Vinci Code. Pope Francis has examined the reports issued by the Vatican theologians in Costa Rica as well as Dr. Ramirez’ argument as devil’s advocate. He has approved the canonization of Pope John Paul II, and the ceremony will be conducted later this year.