Girl Cured of Chronic Pain while Watching Cardinal Newman Beatification

Catholic Deacon Jack Sullivan whose own miraculous healing came
 through the intercession of the Venerable John Henry Newman

Girl Cured of Chronic Pain while Watching Cardinal Newman Beatification - Saints and Angels - Catholic Online

The photograph of Deacon Jack Sullivan and the following article regarding intercessory prayers made to Cardinal John Henry Newman is from Catholic Online:

By Mark Greaves

LONDON, England (UK Catholic Herald) - A young girl was healed of intense chronic pain while watching the beatification of John Henry Newman on television, it has been claimed.

Deacon Jack Sullivan, whose severe spinal condition was miraculously cured after he prayed to Cardinal Newman, said the girl's mother called him after the Mass to say her daughter's pain had suddenly disappeared.

He said she was one of several people who had been cured of serious illness after attending healing services that he has conducted around America.

Deacon Sullivan's own healing, approved by the Vatican last year, led to the Victorian cardinal being beatified in September. A second miracle is all that is needed for the Church to recognise him as a saint.

He said the girl who was healed during Newman's beatification had suffered from reflex sympathetic dystrophy syndrome, a disease characterised by continuous and intense pain that worsens over time and for which there is no cure.

Deacon Sullivan told the Tablet: "Her mother asked me to pray for her daughter, who has been in hospital for two years. I prayed for her during the Mass and the mother called me back all excited saying that during the Mass all of the pain stopped. Lately I've been told that this young lady will be walking before Christmas."


Deacon Sullivan said two other people had been cured after he had touched them with a portion of Newman's hair in healing services in Boston and Salem, New Hampshire.

"One teenage boy was healed from a severe brain injury he had sustained in a car crash". Mr Sullivan said: "He could no longer speak or walk. When I touched him with the relic he seemed to come back to life."

Another man from Detroit was in the advanced stages of liver cancer but after the healing service he said a CAT scan showed "all the cancer had gone".

Deacon Sullivan also said that Newman was "still with me, very dramatically so". He said: "If it weren't for him I probably would have been paralysed, unable to continue with the diaconate or my job. I start my day by saying, 'Good morning, Cardinal Newman, my intercessor and my very faithful friend'."

Pope Benedict's Trip to England an Outreach for Reunion and Beatification of Cardinal Newman

Rev. C.J. McCloskey

Beyond the Beatification of Cardinal Newman: Pope's Trip to England an Outreach for Reunion - International - Catholic Online

The photograph and following excerpt is posted on Catholic Online:

By Father C. John McCloskey III
Wall Street Journal - online.wsj.com

What is most intriguing about Benedict's upcoming visit to England is its ecumenical significance. He has made a remarkable offer to members of the Anglican Communion throughout the world to be received into the Church, singly or in whole congregations, bringing with them their liturgical traditions and even their pastors and bishops.

CHICAGO, IL (Wall Street Journal) - This month Pope Benedict XVI will travel to England for an unprecedented state visit to the United Kingdom, meeting with the Queen at Balmoral Castle and giving an address to Parliament. The occasion for this historic event, however, is not church or international politics-although political issues will doubtless be touched upon-but the beatification (the penultimate step towards sainthood) of John Henry Cardinal Newman.

Newman, whose long life spanned most of the 19th century, was perhaps the greatest religious figure of the last 200 years of British history. Converting from Anglicanism to Catholicism at the age of 44, he wrote cogently and beautifully under both religious affiliations, and was a lightning rod in the passionately argued religious controversies of his time, such as infallibility of the Pope or the legitimacy of Anglicanism as the state church.

Valuing his religious influences as a thinker and evangelizer of the highest caliber, Pope Benedict has made an exception of his thus-far universal practice of not participating in beatification ceremonies. Hence, his trip to Great Britain.

En route to this honor were the standard ecclesial steps: the examination of Newman's life and writings; a declaration that he had lived a life of extraordinary virtue; and official approval by doctors and theologians of a miraculous cure after prayers that Newman would intercede with God on the sufferer's behalf.

The miracle in question holds special interest for Americans, being the recovery in 2001 from a debilitating back condition of the Massachusetts lawyer and deacon Jack Sullivan. His cure was a very modern "media miracle" provoked by a series on Newman on EWTN, Mother Angelica's Catholic broadcasting network. At the end of each episode, a prayer card for Newman was displayed on the screen. Mr. Sullivan prayed for the long-dead cardinal's intercession before God for a cure. The rest (following rigorous medical and ecclesial examination) is now history.

Although Newman was a devout and humble man of great personal warmth and sensitivity, it is difficult to think of him apart from his public career. The author of seminal books of theology and philosophy, such as "The Development of Doctrine" and "A Grammar of Assent," he also dashed off the greatest autobiography in English, "Apologia pro Vita Sua" (a media sensation in his time), in a matter of weeks after personal attacks on his honesty.

Newman's experience in helping found what is today the University College of Dublin inspired his extended argument for a classical liberal education, "The Idea of a University." He also wrote novels of religious conversion and hymns still sung in both Protestant and Catholic churches, such as "Lead, Kindly Light."

He also won early (and continuing) renown as a brilliant preacher. The atheist novelist George Eliot memorized the whole of one of them, "The Second Spring," and would recite it at the drop of a hat at private salons.

As a young and ardent Anglican priest, Newman and like-minded others originated the "Oxford Movement" in an attempt to revive the ancient doctrines and zeal for the "old religion" in an increasingly liberalizing Anglican Church. From the early 1830s up to his conversion to Catholicism in 1845, Newman battled the yielding spirit of Anglican toleration for indifferentism, which manifested itself in the belief that one religion was as good as another.

When his arguments were rejected by his Anglican superiors and he came to believe that his continued membership in the Church of England separated him from what he had now come to regard as the true Church, he converted to Catholicism and was ordained in Rome. Returning to England, he settled in Birmingham, where he founded the Oratory of St. Philip Neri, from which came the famous Brompton Oratory in London.

Newman died in 1890 popularly considered a saint. Over a century later, the Church is vindicating this judgment of the people of the U.K. and the whole English-speaking world. Pope Benedict's decision to preside over Newman's beatification reflects his love and respect for a fellow theologian whose work he has studied from his seminary days, and whose influence on the Second Vatican Council made him perhaps the most influential theologian on the council, even though it was meeting more than 70 years after his death.

Read More: Catholic Online

Deacon Miraculously Healed through Cardinal Newman’s Prayers Tours England - Catholic Online

The following article about Deacon Jack Sullivan is posted on Catholic Online:

The Cause for the Canonization of John Henry Cardinal Newman: (www.newmancause.co.uk/)

Deacon Jack Sullivan’s visit to England will be a special opportunity for English Catholics to discover more about Cardinal Newman and deepen their obedience to the Vicar of Christ.

LONDON (Cause for the Canonization) - Deacon Jack Sullivan, whose miraculous healing in 2001 is the basis for Newman’s Beatification next year, is to visit the Birmingham Oratory (UK) this week, in a event which the Boston deacon has said will be ‘the greatest moment of my life’. His wife Carol will be accompanying him throughout the visit.

On Wednesday and Thursday Deacon Sullivan will visit Cardinal Newman’s room, assist at Mass in his private chapel, and visit his library, a collection of international importance. At the Birmingham Oratory, he will give the only two personal interviews that will be conducted during his visit to the U.K, for the Catholic News Service (U.S.) and EWTN. It was after watching an EWTN broadcast about Newman in 2000 that Jack started praying to Newman for his spinal condition to be healed. Jack wrote down the address of the Birmingham Oratory, heralding the beginning of his providential connection with Newman’s own community.

Jack Sullivan will also be deacon at Mass in the Church of the Oratory, otherwise known as ‘Little Rome’, in Edgbaston. He will also visit Rednal, where Newman was buried in 1890, on the edge of Birmingham.

On Monday and Tuesday, Jack Sullivan will visit London, the place of Newman’s birth, where the Archbishop of Westminster has invited him to a press conference and Mass at Westminster Cathedral on Monday evening (9th November).

On Tuesday evening he will give the Catholic Truth Society 2009 Lecture at the London Oratory in Brompton, the second Oratory founded in England by John Henry Newman, in 1849. Father Ian Ker, the internationally renowned Newman scholar, will be giving an introductory address.

From Thursday to Saturday Deacon Sullivan will be staying at Littlemore, where Newman made his first confession and was received into ‘the one true fold of the Redeemer’, the Catholic Church, in 1845. He will pay visits to Trinity and Oriel Colleges. On Saturday he will visit the Oxford Oratory, founded in 1990, which fulfilled Newman’s hopes of an Catholic Oratory in his own university city.

Newman retained an abiding affection for Oxford, writing of it in his 1875 Letter to the Duke of Norfolk: “No one mourns, for instance, more than I, over the state of Oxford, given up, alas! to ‘liberalism and progress,’ to the forfeiture of her great medieval motto, ‘Dominus illuminatio mea’ [‘The Lord is my Light’]”.

When Jack Sullivan exercises his diaconate at Mass at the Birmingham Oratory at 12.45pm on Wednesday 11 November, he will do so at the Oratory’s ad orientem (east-facing) High altar. This traditional position for Catholic altars has, exceptionally, been preserved at the Birmingham Oratory. Pope Benedict XVI has often spoken of the deep theological and spiritual significance of celebrating Mass ad orientem, and of what has been lost through the current practice of celebrating Mass facing the people. Anticipating a Papal visit to England next year, Wednesday’s Mass links in a special way Newman’s Beatification to Benedict XVI’s own ‘hermeneutic of continuity’.

Father Paul Chavasse, Actor of Newman’s Cause, and Postulator-General of the Oratorian Confederation, said: “Deacon Jack Sullivan’s visit to England will be a special opportunity for English Catholics to discover more about the fascinating figure of Newman, to learn that he is an intercessor in their needs, and to renew their devotion and obedience to the Vicar of Christ, whose anticipated visit to the U.K. will be a powerful affirmation of the universal value of Newman’s path to the Catholic religion.”

Please visit the following link for Deacon Sullivan's Account of the Miracle.