By Aug. 15, 2001, Jack Sullivan thought he could no longer bear the pain. It had taken him 15 minutes just to reach the side of his bed and, desperate, he leaned on his elbows, put his head in his hands and prayed to Cardinal John Henry Newman, a 19th-century Anglican theologian who converted to Roman Catholicism.
Within moments, the Marshfield man says, he felt a warm, tingling sensation and, with it, a tremendous sense of peace, a confidence that everything would be all right. And, just like that, he says, the pain was gone.
Sullivan stood up and walked across the room, and then down the hall, and then throughout the hospital.“They tried to get me back in my room,” he said, “but I just wanted to walk.”
This month, Pope Benedict XVI decreed Sullivan’s recovery a miracle - attributable to Newman - after separate panels of doctors and theologians found that it could not be attributed to treatment.
If the pontiff attributes a second miracle to Newman’s intercession, the cardinal would become the first English-born saint since the Reformation.
Sullivan first prayed to Newman shortly after he woke one morning in June 2000 with agonizing pain in his back and legs. A CAT scan at Jordan Hospital in Plymouth showed that his spinal cord was being pinched by some of his vertebrae. And doctors told him that his spinal stenosis could result in paralysis.
Sullivan was studying to become a deacon, or lay minister, at the time. After seeing a television program about Newman, he prayed that he could get back to his classes and be ordained.
The following morning, he said, he awoke pain-free and, the day after his last class, the pain returned - until that morning a year later in the hospital when he prayed to Newman again.
“I have no scientific or medical explanation,” his doctor told him in October 2001. “You want an answer? Ask God.”
Today, Sullivan is a deacon at St. Thecla Parish in Pembroke and ministers to inmates at Plymouth County Jail when he isn’t tooling about his garden in his scarce spare time at the home he shares with Carol, his wife of 40 years.
Later this year, they plan to visit Newman’s former home in England to celebrate the cardinal’s beatification. In 1991, Newman was proclaimed venerable after an examination of his life and work by the Catholic Church’s Sacred Congregation for the Causes of Saints.
“I’m the last person in the world I’d expect to be the recipient of this kind of gift,” he said. “But hopefully it will give other people a sense of hope. In this day and age, we need it.”
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