[popsicesHoupe]

The website Bartholomew's Notes on Religion lists the same story, plus notes a curiously similar one (where the problem was not a barren wife but a 5-year-old child unable to walk). That other version came from the Lebanese Forces Official Forums website, and was listed along with a second miracle. The poster said he read about them both in the newspaper.

As for the monastery, there is indeed a Greek Orthodox Monastery of the Shepherd's Field near Bethlehem (the mailing address is in East Jerusalem), whose superior is Archimandrite Fr. Agnatios Kazakos. I found their website after a bit of Googling, but it has no mention of the miracle.

There is an article online by a man who spent some time researching this story and, while unable to prove it is false, says that the evidence he found points in that direction. However, since one piece of evidence he claims is that there is no Fr Ignatios in the monasteries around Bethlehem or at the Church of the Shepherd's Field, I must question his researching. It took me maybe 10 minutes of Googling to find Fr Agnatios, and the one-letter difference in names seems completely understandable and excusable to me.

I have found one or two blog/forum posts of people confirming this miracle to others who were questioning, but there wasn't enough information given to know if they had any personal knowledge or were effectively just saying "I believe it".

All the accounts I found seemed to derive from Archimandrite Nektarios' account, except for the one on the Lebanese Forces forum. That's pretty much all I could come up with (I can't read Arabic or other Middle Eastern languages either, so that limited my searching).

In Christ,
Michael