A New Jersey nun who died 80 years ago will be beatified Saturday, the first to be beatified on U.S. soil – for miraculously curing a boy of an eye disease 50 years ago.

The ceremony will take place at the Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Heart in Newark led by Cardinal Angelo Amato. Sister Miriam Teresa Demjanovich, who died in 1927 at 26 years of age, will be beatified. Beatification is the third in a four-step process to becoming a saint in the Catholic faith.

In the 1960s, a boy, Michael Mencer, prayed to Sister Miriam Teresa while holding a lock of her hair. His macular degeneration then started to fade.

According to Sister Mary Canavan of the Sisters of Charity, “Within a period of six weeks, it was totally reversed.”

Mencer recently interviewed with NBC news, describing his miracle. He was given a memento of Sister Miriam Teresa, an ornament decorated with a lock of her hair, by his school teacher. “I kept trying to look at [the memento], trying to focus with my peripheral vision,” said Mencer, who did not have central vision at this time, “I looked up and I saw an orb in the middle… I thought was the sun, but it didn’t hurt…. But then when I looked back down at the memento… I could see the hair in the memento.

“It still didn’t dawn on me that a miracle had happened.”

A servant of God will be beatified once the pope validates a miracle has occurred as a result of a person praying to the servant after the servant has died. It took 50 years for this nun’s miracle to be validated because the tale was lost to history until a letter from the mother of Mencer was found last year.

Americans have been beatified before, but never on American soil. These ceremonies traditionally occur in Rome, Italy.