It’s official: Healing miracle at Knock Shrine, Ireland! John Curry saw Our Lady when he was 5 years old… and St. Joseph… and St. John the Evangelist. But he was not the only visionary. They were also seen by 14 other countrymen in his hometown, Knock (Ireland).
Later, at the age of 25, he emigrated to work in the United States as a railroad worker. Then, in his old age, when he was more than 60 years old, he was taken in by the Little Sisters of the Poor and helped at Mass. He was also in charge of picking up the dining room every day.
-I see that your name is John Curry and you are Irish… Do you know Knock, where Our Lady appeared? Do you know the John Curry who appeared to Our Lady?” asked one of the consecrated sisters of the house who was reading about the apparition at the time.
-That John Curry is the one who helps at Mass with you every morning in this house,” Curry replied and then, amused by the event, wrote it down in a letter.
John Curry, the boy who saw Our Lady, died in 1943 at the age of 68. He was the last of the Knock visionaries. He was born poor, lived poor and died poor. He was buried in a grave without a headstone in a communal cemetery owned by the Little Sisters of the Poor on Long Island.
In the silence is the message… and the miracle…
Knock is a peculiar apparition: many witnesses and no message. Our Lady is accompanied by her husband and her guardian son, John, the new man of the house, given by Jesus at the foot of the Cross: “Son, there is your Mother; Mother, there is your son”, he told her. For two hours, in the rain, they were there.
In the Knock shrine they explain that the message is not words, the message is presence. And looking for that grace that expands powerfully in the silence of the soul, Marion Carroll came to Knock thirty years ago. Ill with Multiple Sclerosis.
“Thirty years ago … Marion was healed here at Our Lady’s Shrine. Today, the Church formally recognizes that this healing admits of no medical explanation and joins in prayer, praise and thanksgiving to God,” stated Tuam Archbishop Michael Near, this Sept. 1 in whose diocese the Knock Shrine is located.
At the time of the announcement and among the huge number of pilgrims were Marion Carroll herself, her husband Jimmy, their two children and five grandchildren.
Completely paralyzed
Marion (picture attached) is now 68 years old, thirty years older than that September 1989 when she went on pilgrimage to Knock and was carried on a stretcher because of multiple sclerosis she was suffering from. There she asked Our Lady to cure her and immediately all the symptoms of the disease disappeared.
This woman tells Catholic News Service how she lived that day when she was cured in this Marian shrine. She remembers perfectly that she had to be carried on a stretcher during that diocesan pilgrimage because she was “completely paralyzed.”
“I was doubly incontinent, blind in one eye, and had very little sight in the other. I couldn’t eat or speak properly, and I had epilepsy,” Carroll says. She also explains that she felt herself dying, not from multiple sclerosis, but from all the secondary complications caused by the disease, especially the persistent kidney infections.
A whispering breeze
Once inside the sanctuary, and after praying before Our Lady, the blessing of the sick took place, and the then Bishop of Ardgah, Msgr. O’Really, blessed her with the monstrance carrying the Blessed Sacrament while she was on her stretcher.
This woman recalls that “when he blessed me, I had a beautiful feeling, it was a magnificent thing, and then a whispering breeze told me that if I opened the fastenings of the stretcher I could get up and walk.”
After the Eucharist, the then young Marion was taken on her stretcher to St. John’s Rest and Care Center in Knock. Once there, the doctors and nurses were puzzled by the woman’s insistent request to open her stretcher. One nurse told her sometime later that she agreed to do so so that she would “calm down.”
“My healing in Knock does not belong to me.”
However, as soon as she was able to be without the stretcher restraints she was able to lower her legs to the floor. “I stood up straight and didn’t feel stiff” despite years of paralysis, she says. In addition, she regained her voice perfectly as well as the movement of her arms.
Marion confesses, “My healing in Knock does not belong to me. This is a special gift to let people know that Jesus and Mary are there”. At the moment, this woman actively collaborates in her parish, cares for the sick in the Marian shrine and also accompanies the dying.
Father Richard Gibbons, rector of Knock, explained that the announcement of the miraculous healing came “after many years of investigation by a medical committee established by the Knock Shrine to examine the case, and this is the first official healing in the 140-year history of the shrine”.
The letter from a Digestive Tract physician to the committee stated that “regardless of whether your condition is organic or psychological, the tremendous improvement since the time of your visit to Knock is inexplicable.” It further added that “my feeling is that your improvement is very unlikely to be explained by conventional medical wisdom.”
It’s official: Healing miracle at Knock Shrine, Ireland! See the original Spanish post here
