ESMiracle at Knock
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| Marion Carroll. Cured instantaneously of advanced Multiple Sclerosis at Knock |
Augustine said God is working miracles all the time—if we look at the wonders of nature, or our own bodies or just our eyes, we discover myriads of miracles. Unfortunately, we tend to lose our sense of wonder. So every so often, Augustine said, God works a miracle in an extraordinary, startling way. Miracle cures are startling and encouraging, as is meeting the recipients. I have discovered there are a joyfulness and freshness to these people, a simplicity and a humility.
I found these qualities when I met Marion Carroll in Athlone, seventy-five miles west of Dublin.
She was born Marion McCormack in 1951 in this city on the Shannon River, also birthplace of the tenor Count John McCormack (no relation). Her parents were not well off. While she was a tiny child, they were forced to make ends meet by going off to work in England, leaving her with relatives. Tuberculosis was a dreaded killer among Ireland’s poor in the 1950s. Marion contracted it when she was only seven years old. She was sent to the Peamount Sanatorium, Dublin, and the doctors warned her family that her life was in grave danger. Her father, who often used to read his children the lives of the saints, led the family in prayers to Mary. The little one survived, and, despite his meager resources, he had a Lourdes Grotto built in Athlone to thank the Mother of God, convinced Mary’s prayers to God had saved Marion’s life. The child developed a special prayer bond with Mary.
Marion was no lover of schoolbooks. When she finished compulsory education at age fourteen, she left school and waltzed casually through her remaining teen years as factory worker, shop assistant and waitress. She lost her heart to Elvis Presley’s songs, and her mother wondered if his pictures might displace the images of the Sacred Heart and Mary on her bedroom walls. But they did not.
Then came a redheaded Irish soldier who put Elvis right out of her mind. She met Jimmy Carroll at a dance in December 1970 and fell in love “truly, madly, deeply”.
An Irish soldier’s pay wasn’t much in those days, so Jimmy had to work hard at getting enough money to rent a house. Then he asked McCormack if he could marry his daughter. Marion’s joy was dissipated soon after the wedding, however, when Jimmy was sent on a tour of duty with the United Nations peacekeepers in Cyprus.
Their first child, Anthony, was born in 1973, and soon after that Marion’s problems started. She took little notice at first, having heard of many mothers having postnatal problems. On top of a great tiredness, she was getting a sensation of pins and needles in one leg as well as bouts of intense pain. When Anthony was ten months old she moved toward his crib one day and suddenly found herself falling onto it. The doctor diagnosed a slipped disc and put her leg in traction for some weeks. There was no improvement, and her chronic tiredness grew in intensity. She began having temporary blackouts. When a sharp-tongued relative dismissed her complaints as just “nerves and malingering”, Marion decided to keep her troubles to herself. Nor did she tell Jimmy, who was away in the army.
By the time Cora was born in late 1976, Marion was often unsteady on her feet and with her grip. She only cuddled Cora by laying her on the double bed, lest she drop her. She had given birth to both children by cesarean and began to suspect that this had caused her physical debility and increasing sense of being a wrung-out rag. She suffered frequent headaches, and her vision began to swim.
At Jimmy’s father s funeral, Marion had a complete blackout and fell to the ground. They rushed her to Tullamore Hospital. When she opened her eyes, everything was blurred, and colors were jumbled together. Her hearing was very faint. The doctor suggested she go to Dublin for a brain scan and also to have a kidney infection looked at. It was 1978.
After Marion had been hospitalized several days and examined by a neurologist, Jimmy was suddenly called from his barracks in Cork to the hospital. The neurologist wanted him to break the news to Marion. Jimmy wrote the dreaded words on his hand with a ballpoint pen. As soon as he came to her bedside, she knew something was wrong. Jimmy was not due for leave. He dismissed her worries, but she noticed writing on his hand. Maybe he subconsciously glanced at it. As he tried to draw his hand away, she held it and read “MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS”.
Irish author John Scally wrote a book, “Marion: A Modern-Day Miracle”, in which he detailed Marion’s steady decline over the years from 1978, when she was told she had multiple sclerosis (MS), until her cure at Knock in 1989. It makes for sad reading, telling how her body deteriorated and she got around shakily on two sticks. Jimmy had a simple but rock-solid faith in Christ’s teaching and in the meaning of the marriage vows. He nursed Marion at home, took her on regular trips to the hospital and specialists and encouraged her with the latters’ hopes of “the latest American breakthrough”. When her hand shook too much to hold a cup of tea, he gave her straws.
In 1983 the Carrolls moved back to Athlone, and Dr. Patrick O’Meara took over her case. He boosted her morale and Jimmy’s tremendously by excellent medical help and deeply spiritual values. In 1988 pain and debility increased in Marion’s legs, and she had some bad falls. Dr. O’Meara put her into Athlone Hospital. From now on, he said, she was to be permanendy in a bed or wheelchair. Her kidney infection had flared up again, her speech was slurring badly, and her throat muscles were gradually contracting. She could no longer hold up her head, so in August 1989 Dr. O’Meara put her into a surgical collar. She was now doubly incontinent. “I was at a stage where I had no dignity left”, she said. “MS had taken that.” At this stage she had to be strapped into her wheelchair or she could fall out. She had lost use of both legs, was blind in the right eye and had partial sight in the left. As she lost strength in her bite and her throat muscles deteriorated, all food given to her had to be liquefied so she could sip through a straw. Dr. O’Meara was treating her for kidney and thyroid problems and for a hiatus hernia.
Jimmy’s devotion and the family Rosary were rays in her darkness, Marion said. The car Jimmy had proudly bought several years earlier had to be sold to pay medical bills. Jimmy would push her to Mass in her wheelchair, one and one-half miles each way.
Marion had a great longing to go to Lourdes, but the family’s precarious finances ruled that out.
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| Mrs. Judy Coyne of the Knock Shrine Handmaids, August 1997. |
At the beginning of September their friend Gerry Glynn, a local ambulance driver, called in and said he was free on Sunday, September 3. How about it if he drove her to Knock in his ambulance? She said no; she did not feel up to a sixty-mile journey. Besides, Dr. O’Meara had told her to be ready for a major kidney operation the following week. But Jimmy and Gerry said the trip to Knock would help her. They argued strongly, and, against her better judgment, she agreed. She felt she would soon be dead, anyhow.
Gerry strapped her onto the bed in his ambulance, put the folded wheelchair aboard and set off. Because of her state, he drove cautiously. The driving took much more out of her than Jimmy and Gerry had anticipated. Marion told me that, being incontinent, she was all “messed up” by the time they reached Knock. Judy Coyne—founder and head of the Knock Handmaids—told me she personally helped clean Marion. “Do you remember Marion Carroll?” I asked her in 1997. “Remember her? How could I forget her?” she said. “The ambulance driver brought her to our station because she was in a terrible state. As I cleaned her up, I discovered her legs were paralyzed, and she had no power in her hands. She was quite blind in one eye. The other was blurred. Her words were jumbled and almost unintelligible. I’ve seen many sick and dying here in Knock. I had serious doubts about this one making it back to Athlone alive!”
Judy Coyne, still quite a force despite her age, ordered the cleaned-up Marion to rest at the Handmaids Centre until the ceremonies began. Then they pushed her, strapped tight in her wheelchair, into the Basilica and right up directly in front of the statue of Mary of Knock.
Marion continued the story:
I looked up and thought the statue was the most beautiful and friendly I had ever seen. I knew I was dying, and my children needed a mother.
Above all I was sad for Jimmy. We had been married seventeen years, and most of that time he was burdened with a sick wife. I couldn’t get my thoughts in order. I wanted to try to express them to another woman, another housewife who would understand. So I looked up at our Lady and said: “You are a mother, too. You know how I feel about leaving my husband and children”. It wasn’t a prayer; it wasn’t a statement; it was just one woman chatting to another. I then prayed to her asking her to look after Jimmy and the children and give them the grace to accept my death as the will of God.
Bishop Colin O’Reilly concluded the Rosary and prayers for the sick. He led a team of priests anointing the sick, including Marion. She was telling me this story matter-of-factly in her home in Athlone with Jimmy beside her not saying a word, just quietly smiling. She suddenly became animated and said:
Then I received the Eucharist and got a tremendous pain in both heels, which was very unusual. Next the pain disappeared, and so did all other pains in my body. Then followed another Rosary, Benediction, and the final blessing over the sick. It was at this moment I got this magnificent feeling, a wonderful sensation like a whispering breeze telling me I was cured—that if the straps were loosened I could get up and walk. Being very practical, I laughed that off. Anyhow, I knew if I asked anyone to unstrap me, the nurse nearby who had helped me at the Handmaids clinic would put a stop to it.
I thought, Jimmy always sorts things out for me. I’ll ask him when I get home. Then the nagging thought: But if I’m cured here at Knock and remain passive, maybe the grace will be taken back.
Just then my friend Nuala came over to say hello. I asked her to unstrap me, and I stood up, straight. It was three years since I’d managed that. My arms and hands were back to normal, my head wasn’t sagging, and the awful slurring in my speech was gone.
I was taken back to the Handmaids place, and Mrs. Coyne sat me down, and I told her I was cured. Was I seeing clearly? she asked. I said yes, and she handed me a copy of the Knock Annual put out by the Handmaids. The print was clear, and I read the first line on the page: “Why is the Rosary so powerful?” I stopped reading and told her excitedly: “That’s our prayer. That’s the prayer of our family and our home. It keeps me going during the darkest times.”
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| Shrine of Knock, Ireland |
Marion finished reading the article out loud. It was a special joy to be handed a cup of tea, to be able to hold it steady and drink it without a straw. Judy Coyne’s late husband, Judge Liam Coyne, had written a history of Knock with descriptions of shrine miracles, so she questioned Marion carefully for future reference.
Gerry Glynn had left Athlone at 9 a.m., and it was now nearly 6 p.m. He thought he should get Marion home, lest she get exhausted. “I sat up straight the whole way home in the ambulance, not even leaning back”, she said. She has a keen sense of fun and decided to surprise Jimmy, asking Gerry to wheel her from the ambulance in her chair. As Gerry wheeled her in, Jimmy asked, “How was Knock?” She replied deadpan, “Ah, it was all right. Sure, why would anybody bother going down there!” Then, as they reached the patio, she got out of the chair and said: “Look, Jimmy, I can walk.” “Oh, God, Mar”, he gasped, “don’t!” Said Marion, “I went over and put my arms around him, and I never saw a man crying like that”.
They contacted Dr. Patrick O’Meara by telephone. He feared they were exaggerating, that she was experiencing merely a temporary euphoria resulting from the fervor at the Knock shrine. He came the next day and was bewildered.
Marion’s leg muscles should have been wasted and unable to support walking after three years of nonuse, but she was walking. Her catheter had been draining pus and blood because of the kidney he was due to operate on that week. Now it ran clear. “Marion, you were very sick when I saw you on Friday”, said the doctor. “Something wonderful has happened. I’ve never seen it happen before. What do we do now?” He finally suggested they play it safe—“Stay in bed while I check you each day.” Three days later he agreed she could forget bed and wheelchair. Leave the catheter in, though, he added. Sometimes an operation is needed to remove one that has been in such a long time.
Two weeks later Dr. O’Meara said he was sending the nurse to try to remove the catheter. Marion became apprehensive. Would it be a problem? Was the healing only partial and temporary? “When I don’t know what to do, I pray the Rosary, which I did”, she said. “The nurse came and removed the catheter, and everything worked normally. I’ve never had kidney problems since. Nor have I had any pain. Since my Knock experience in 1989, I’ve never taken as much as an aspirin.”
I had read and heard a lot about Marion Carroll before meeting her. With the blessing and urging of her ordinary, Bishop Cohn O’Reilly, she has accepted invitations in Ireland and abroad to tell the story of her cure. The bishop and Marion hope through these public meetings to counter the strong antigospel messages in modern society. I kept meeting people who had heard her and were charmed by her freedom from “airs” and pretentiousness. An American magazine put her on its cover and devoted a full page to the cure in November 1994. A television station in Australia did a feature on her. Just before setting out on my world-circling journey to meet miracle cases, I read a large article on her in the Irish Sunday Tribune of April 6, 1997. All this prepared me for a wonderful and leisurely interview with Marion and Jimmy in August 1997. Their home and lives have been joyful but frugal. She has gone anywhere she has been asked to speak.
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| Marion Carroll and husband, Jimmy, August 1997. |
Jimmy has gone with her, as silent support, as often as possible. After I had asked her all my questions, she said, “Sure, I get exhausted with all the talking and traveling. But praying before the Blessed Sacrament restores my energy. Prayer is the real answer to all our problems. I feel sad when I come across priests who seem too busy to find time for prayer. I’m sure that’s why we’ve had priests’ sex scandals. I met a priest recently who complained of loneliness, suggesting celibacy was the problem. I told him he was wrong, and he’d solve his problem with a deeper prayer life. He didn’t like my straight talk!”
As I sat in the train going back to Dublin, I knew why people had told me Marion wins people by her straight talk and refusal to dispense “cheap grace”. It reminded me of the tending-to-be-cynical barrister and journalist Patrick Marnham. In his book Lourdes, he said among the pilgrims he saw “religion of the people ... that challenges the dominant Catholicism of the intellect, that subtle, temporizing, qualified faith ... instead of the robust faith of those Christ came to save”.
Marnham has seen too much lying, hypocrisy and media hype not to be cynical of our present society. He discovered a different world at Lourdes, if you will spare him some testy outbursts at the human foibles of some native Lourdais and Lourdes pilgrims! He wrote of “the intense happiness on the faces of the sick” who have discovered at Lourdes that suffering has “meaning and use”. The Lourdes Grotto, “once the desolate scene of fantastic visions ... has become responsible for the health or happiness of thousands of incurably sick and the comfort of millions of their healthy companions”. For so many, Lourdes, and similar pilgrim shrines like Knock, have become “a direct experience of divine power ... and a passionate return to the certainties”. Marnham has some good pages on the exacting examinations carried out by the Medical Bureau to establish a miraculous cure. Having quoted Cardinal Newman, —“A miracle is no argument to one who is deliberately, and on principle, an atheist”— he mentioned cases of modern doctors who refuse to study Lourdes miracles on principle.
Sixteen-year-old René Scher went on pilgrimage to Lourdes in 1966 from the northeast of France. He had been quite blind since childhood, when an operation went wrong. When Bishop Fox of Wrexham (West England) blessed the sick with the Blessed Sacrament, René Scher’s sight was restored. The Medical Bureau confirmed this that same day. However, the doctors at the Metz institute for the blind where René had resided refused the Lourdes Medical Bureau’s formal requests for documentation on his case. There have been not a few similar cases where doctors, because of their ideology that miracles cannot happen (faith in reverse?), have refused all cooperation with the Lourdes Medical Bureau in the investigation of an alleged cure.
Collier's Encyclopedia calls Blaise Pascal “one of the greatest minds of the seventeenth century”. He left his mark in secular sciences—he pioneered the principles of hydrodynamics and hydrostatics, he invented the syringe and hydraulic press, he perfected the barometer, he made the West’s first calculating machine, and he gave Pascal’s theorem to mathematics. However, he abandoned all these studies to pursue “absolute truth”. He was convinced he experienced it on November 23, 1654, when he wrote on a small page that he was still carrying on his person when he died in 1662: “Fire. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob. Not of philosophers and scholars. Certainty, certainty, heartfelt joy, peace. God of Jesus Christ.” After that he gave himself to prayer, and to writing and discussions devoted to one purpose, to bring others to this faith. He said that to find absolute truth you need to add something vital to your scientific searching. The human mind, no matter how scientific, he pointed out, can be most devious and self-seeking. You need an honest heart to find the deepest truths. He added, “The heart has reasons that reason knows nothing of.”
Disappointed with the motives of some with whom he had controversies, he wrote in Pensées, “There is enough light for those who desire only to see, and enough darkness for those of a contrary disposition.”
Some days after interviewing Marion, I went to Knock. It was a squally day. Gusts of wind drove rain into our faces. That did not stop the pilgrims walking in groups around the original church of the apparitions, heads bowed under umbrellas, reciting the Rosary in subdued voices. Monsignor Grealy met me very warmly, answered my questions and arranged for me to interview two people closely associated with Marion’s cure. I have written of the first, Judy Coyne.
The second was Dr. Diarmuid Murray, in charge of the shrine clinic. I asked his opinion of Marion’s case. “When she was ill in the seventies and eighties we did not have the new test to identify MS absolutely”, he said. “Some doctors have said she did not have it at all—though none of these seem actually to have examined her! To me and to her own Dr. Pat O’Meara, who is a friend from medical school by the way, putting an absolutely correct name to very physical symptoms is not the central point. Doctors have only gradually been able to define and delineate diseases. There is no doubt in my mind, or in Dr. O’Mearas, that Marion Carroll’s instantaneous recovery is beyond medical explanation.”
There was a recent and famous Australian politician about whom a media commentator said, “If you accused him, for instance, of stealing your property, he would sternly reply, ‘But your dog has rabies!’ He’d do it with such belligerence that before you knew it, the discussion shifted from your property to your dog and rabies.” I see something similar happening in some of the attacks on modern miracles. Words and ideas are thrown out covering all manner of things except the unexplained fact of the instantaneous cure.
Reflections on Modern Miracles
Fr. Paul Glynn