NEWARK, N.J. — A half-century ago, a young boy’s eye disease mysteriously vanished, and the New Jersey nun credited with curing him will be beatified Saturday.

Sister Miriam Teresa Demjanovich, who died in 1927 at age 26, is to be beatified in a ceremony led by Cardinal Angelo Amato at the Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Heart in Newark. The ceremony is the third in the four-step process to sainthood.

Sister Miriam Teresa is credited with curing a boy’s macular degeneration in the 1960s, according to the Archdiocese of Newark.

The boy, Michael Mencer, was given a lock of the sister’s hair and prayed to her. The effects of the eye disease soon began to fade, church officials say.

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

Mencer told NBC News that his teacher gave him the lock of hair in a plastic container along with a prayer card. On a walk home later that day, he recalled noticing changes in his sight.

“I was about two blocks from the house when I think it happened,” he told NBC. “I looked up at what I thought was the sun, and it didn’t hurt my eyes, but I could see an orb, a bright light. And when I looked back down I could see the hair in the memento.”

The beatification comes less than a year after the event was certified as a miracle by Pope Francis, although church officials started the process in 1945 when the bishop of Paterson began studying Sister Miriam Teresa’s life and virtues, according to the Sisters of Charity.