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Through the Intercession of Saints

I believe in the communion of saints. It’s one of the things I love most about the Catholic Church. I wish I could say that my coming to embrace it arose in the first instance out of a happy circumstance. It would flatter my perception of myself to think that I responded spontaneously to the countless blessings of my life by turning more fully toward my faith—to think back that when I knocked on God’s door in earnest, I had come bearing a gift and not a request. But that is not what happened. So much, I suppose, for my membership among the spiritual elite.

What happened in my case was a crisis. It was a family crisis that took place in Seattle, Washington, where my two brothers lived with their families, on the other side of the country from where my wife, Ursula, and I live in Connecticut. My younger brother’s second child, Pattie Jane, was to undergo open-heart surgery at the ripe old age of eight weeks.

In case you have never considered it, this means attaching an infant girl to something called a heart and lung machine and actually stopping her heart so that it can be picked and probed over by an entire team of medical professionals. (God bless them and their skill and dedication.) It means isolation, bright lights, and scalpels for a little person with the face of an angel, whose height is still measured in inches. It is hours upon endless hours of agonizing helplessness and anxiety for parents and family. It is people you love forced to take their seats across from Death in a hospital waiting room three thousand miles away, each side sizing the other up, equally anxious to see what the outcome will be.

My family on the East Coast felt like we had to do something, so we set in motion an international network of prayer for the day of the procedure. Family and friends from all over the United States and the world would be praying for life. I am a cradle Catholic, and had never really fallen away, but I had permitted my religious observance to become something stale, more rote than truly sacramental. So I started to attend the noontime rosary at St. John the Evangelist Church, around the block from where I work.

The dim cathedral lighting, the repetition of the familiar prayers, the guided meditations, the timbre of the voice of the older man who led (and still leads) the group—all of this spoke to my heart and was profoundly comforting to me. I was doing what I could. Ultimately, as I would discover later is quite common, Mary led me gently, through the mysteries of the rosary, back to the confessional and the sacrament of reconciliation. I felt fully at home again for the first time in a very long time.

Pattie Jane’s surgery was deemed a success, but with qualifications as to seeing how she took to it, how things would develop, whether there would be infection, and a host of other contingencies. This was toward the end of the year 2000. We thanked God for the good news, but all soon understood that we would need to get accustomed to this business of waiting and uncertainty.

For many years my wife and I had been hoping for a family ourselves, and were dealing with our own, different cycles of waiting and uncertainty. We were just about at the end of the long and difficult process of investigating and trying what could be offered in the way of morally licit medical intervention but had met only with disappointment and discouragement.

January of 2001 brought the unsettling news that a scheduled checkup for Pattie Jane had revealed a serious enlargement in her heart and liver, resulting in some displacement of the liver. By then my younger brother had moved his family from Seattle to a town outside of Boston, and Pattie Jane was being treated at Boston Children’s Hospital. The next milestone would be in March, when the doctors would perform a procedure involving the introduction—through her foot of all things—of a diagnostic device to reach and examine her heart in order to gauge what we all prayed would be its progress.

At the beginning of that month of March, I went on a silent retreat with my father and brother-in-law over a long weekend. Of course, I prayed constantly for Pattie Jane, and I prayed also for my wife and myself—not for having a baby per se (we had decided not to do that) but rather for the acceptance of whatever God’s plan for us was.

Each night during the retreat the retreat master would distribute a leaflet containing cites to a selection of fifteen or so readings from Scripture to help illustrate the day’s points. We could read one or more or all of them as we chose. On one of the last nights, just before bed I picked up the leaflet and chose a reading at random, from somewhere in the middle of the list. It turned out to be chapter 8 of Paul’s letter to the Romans. It is still hard for me to believe, but about halfway through that chapter there is a statement about receiving the “spirit of adoption.” (v. 23). My eyes welled up with tears as I read it—as they do now as I write these words. I spoke to Ursula about it and, like Mary after the presentation in the Temple, we pondered in our hearts its significance.

Later that March, the procedure for the Pattie Jane (her godfather calls her “the Little Engine That Could”) turned up mostly good news. There would not have to be another surgery, but the enlargement of the heart and liver was still worrisome. They would take another look in three months. That would be June.

In May, my wife and I attended a special annual Mass in Stamford, Connecticut, in honor of San Gerardo Majella (Saint Gerard), the patron saint of mothers and their children. It is said that he was an extremely sickly child himself, so much so that he nearly died of illness in his infancy. So many healings of children and babies were credited to his prayers and intercession in his lifetime that he won for himself the nickname “Wonder Worker.” Prayers to San Gerardo have resulted in untold numbers of healthy pregnancies where the hopes of pregnancy had all but been abandoned by doctors and couples alike. We decided, as ever, to forego prayers at the San Gerardo Mass for a specific outcome for ourselves. Rather, we would continue to pray for the right thing to happen. We did permit ourselves the luxury (and privilege) of outcome-specific prayers for the healing of Pattie Jane.

The Mass was sublime. Priests came all the way from Italy to concelebrate. They brought with them relics in beautiful reliquaries—not for “magic” or “saint worship” but in the true spirit of honor and devotion. The pageantry and the prayers and hymns—all so gloriously Catholic, said and sung in both Italian and English, booming inside a packed little community church—were something neither Ursula nor I will ever forget, something we will return to every year whenever we possibly can.

Well, June came at last and (can you guess the ending of my story?) the doctors were delighted: Pattie Jane’s heart had returned to normal size, and her liver had not only returned to normal size, it had shifted back into place! That summer, which was last summer, Ursula and I decided that we would take our own medical procedures no further. Rather, we started the process of adopting an infant child from a South American orphanage in Colombia. The outpouring of love and support we have received from family and from friends has been astonishing.

What more can I say? Our prayers have truly been answered. Pattie Jane is an angel, now two years old, putting on weight and smart as a whip. By this time next year, with God’s continued help, after thirteen years of marriage Ursula and I will be parents. And we owe it all to God’s goodness through the intercession of Mary (who called me back to observance and without whom I never would have gone on the March retreat), and St. John (in whose church I was called back to my senses) and San Gerardo (whose Mass I was inspired to attend and whose life and works I was inspired to find out about).

By the way (since we’re on the subject of mysteries), not only is my name John, but Ursula’s maiden name is St. John—and her middle name, appropriately enough, is Marie. Pattie Jane’s birthday is April 6, the day before San Gerardo’s. And, as it turns out, San Gerardo’s feast day falls on October 16—my birthday.

I promised these wonderful saints I would thank them publicly for their most powerful intercession and would let whomever would listen know exactly how these things in my life came about. So thank you, Mary. Thank you, Saint John. And thank you, San Gerardo. Amen. Amen. Amen.

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