Nothing Short of a Miracle

In these pages, you’ll learn of countless miraculous healings that have occurred in our lifetime through the intercession of the saints. Among these stories are:

The Philadelphia school teacher who had an inoperable malignant tumor. She was so feeble she could scarcely walk, but was healed instantaneously while praying at the tomb of Saint John Neumann.

The young child who was visited in the night by Saint Padre Pio, and woke the next morning healed of congenital heart problems.

Joseph Jette was twenty-two years old when the scaffolding he was climbing collapsed and left him crippled for life with a fractured spinal column. Br. Andre Bessett tells him to put down his crutches and walk. He obeyed, and was instantly cured.

Jim sustained massive brain injury after his motorcycle smashed into a car and sent him flying thirty feet into the air. “I was working on a dead man,” the surgeon said. Having lost a daughter years before, Jim’s parents prayed to Eizabeth Seton, who had five children of her own. Jim not only fully recovered from that crash 35 years ago, but still lives today.

God doesn’t need humans to work miracles for Him, but as veteran Catholic author Patricia Treece shows, it certainly seems His good pleasure to perform great miracles by means of human prayers and human hands.

For more than a quarter century, Treece — America’s most experienced and revered saint-watcher — has gathered numerous fascinating reports of miraculous healings brought about in our lifetime.

Among them is the complete 2005 cure of Sr. Marie Simon-Pierre’s advanced Parkinson’s disease after she appealed for healing to the just-deceased Pope John Paul II. After intense scrutiny, the Vatican declared her healing miraculous, leading to John Paul’s beatification and canonization.

Here, too, are tales of scores of lesser-known healings brought to light by Treece’s own investigations into little-known official Vatican documents, as well as from her many interviews with living witnesses of miraculous healings, including several whose healings have been accepted by the Vatican as grounds for the canonization of their intercessors.

You’ll read vivid but sober accounts of the lives and of the miracles wrought by some of the greatest 19th and 20th century saints of all, with details of a host of authenticated healings by André Bessette, John Bosco, Frances Cabrini, Solanus Casey, John Paul II, Padre Pio, Elizabeth Seton, Francis Xavier Seelos, Fulton Sheen, Mother Teresa, and other good men and women blessed by God.

The healings documented here are not hasty judgments made by gullible, overwrought believers; they’re instantaneous, complete, and permanent cures for which scientific medicine still has no explanations — cures that also meet the Vatican’s stringent seven-part test of authenticity.

When faced with a woman skeptical about whether she could be cured, the healer Solanus Casey is reported to have said, “Don’t you know that God can cure cancer just as easily as the common cold?”

Not only can God do this: These pages show that He is doing it … so often and so obviously that even in our day miraculous healings are giving pause to hardened skeptics and bringing joy to the hearts of believers who rightly see in them overwhelming evidence of God’s love for each of us. May they bring joy to your heart as well and renew the confidence in His love that God yearns for you to have!