The Faith, the Family, the Future, Father Patrick O’Connor: On Friday morning, September 10th, 1937, I came face to face with a miracle. The meeting place was a bustling railway station in France. There was no mistaking the miracle, as with the weight and strength of sixteen stone of burly humanity it helped me to fight my way on to a crowded train.
The name of the miracle was John Traynor. I first beheld him as I came along the platform with my suitcase and saw him waiting to board the coach in which I hoped to ride. A powerfully built man, about five feet ten in height, with a strong, wholesome, ruddy face, dressed in a rather rumpled grey suit, carrying his travelling bag, he stood out from the surrounding crowd. Two of his little boys were with him, and eight or ten Irish and English pilgrims on their way home from Lourdes.
Now John Traynor was a miracle because, by all the laws of nature, he should not have been standing there, hefty and healthy. He should have been, if alive at all, paralysed, epileptic, a mass of sores, shrunken, with a shrivelled, useless right arm and a gaping hole in his skull. That is what he had been. That is the way medical science had certified that he must remain. Only a miracle could cure him. … A miracle did. Read the story here.
