Miraculous Transport
Unusual speed, unlikely vehicles, arriving at destinations without being aware that travel has occurred are all hallmarks of miraculous transport miracles.
Bilocation is a phenomenon associated with a saint being in two places at the same time, whereas miraculous transport involves unusual forms of travel. These miraculous transport cases have been associated with religious figures like saints.
St. Ammon the Great 350
St. Athanasius relates a story of St. Ammon the Great who was traveling with Theodore, a disciple. The two had come across a river that had risen so high that they would have to swim across it.
Separating in order to undress, St. Ammon was feeling uncomfortable with this lack of modesty. But before he had a chance to even think about it, he looked up and found he had been miraculously transported to the other side the river.
When the disciple asked him how he had done this, St. Ammon finally told him it had been a miracle but asked that he not retell this story until after his death.
St. Dominic (Founder of the Dominicans) 1221
In the company of a Cistercian monk, St. Dominic (who received The Holy Rosary in a vision of Mary) and he arrived at a church where St. Dominic had hoped to pray before the altar for the night. But when they had come, the church doors were closed and locked.
There are at least two other instances in the life St. Hyacinth where he is said to have walked on water. Witnessed by over 400 people, St. Hyacinth was going to preach at Wisgrade and had to cross the Vistula.
Three companions were with him and the waters were so rough that the boats refused to go out due to storms and weather. According to reports, St. Hyacinth made the sign of the cross and began to walk as if he were on ‘firm land.’ The multitude on the other side of the bank saw him do this.
A similar story is related of him in Russia later in his life.
Others who Experienced Miraculous Transports
Others who were known to have had Miraculous Transports included St. Seraphin of M ontegranaro, St. Anthony of Padua, Blessed Bentivolgia de Bonis, Pere Lamy, St. Colette, St. Germaine Cousin, St. Martin De Porres, St. John Joseph of the Cross, St. Paul of the Cross, St. Anthony Mary Claret, St. Peter Regalado, St. Peter of Alcantara, Blessed Catherine of Racconigi.
Saints Known to Have Ridden in Unusual Vessels
St. Gerard Majella in 1755 produced an extraordinary miracle of this kind. At the seashore of Naples, a huge ship could be seen in the distance which was about to capsize. Many people were screaming. St. Gerard Majella made the sign of the cross and shouted, “In the name of the Most Holy Trinity, pause!”
Throwing his mantle into the water, he rode it out to the foundering ship and with his own hand stabilized and dragged it back to shore.
Others who also produced Extraordinary Vessels included St. Francis Solano, St. Francis of Paola, St. Raymond of Penaford, Blessed Alvarex of Cordova and Blessed Jane of Signa.
HEALINGS:
Mother Cabrini’s First Miracle
March 14, 1921
Yawning openly on this gray afternoon, a young nurse makes a last round of her newborn charges in New York City’s Columbus Hospital Extension on 163rd Street. In the final moments of an unusually busy shift, the weary nurse’s thoughts are already far from babies as she bends over the whimpering Smith infant at whose midday birth she assisted two hours earlier.
Instantly wide awake, Mae Redmond gasps, “Oh God! Oh God!” for infant Smith’s face is like charred wood, cheeks and lips blackened and burnt. Pus exudes from both tiny nostrils. Worst, where eyes should be are only two grotesque edemic swellings.
Horrified, Mae must struggle not to pass out as her mind grasps for how this can be. No one has handled the newborn after his normal delivery since she herself weighed and measured him and put in the eye drops prescribed by law.
The drops! Suddenly her panic lunges in a definite direction. She staggers across the nursery and picks up the bottle of 1-percent silver-nitrate solution used in the newborn’s eyes. What she reads on the label makes her shriek hysterically again and again, “Doctor! Oh God! Get a doctor!”
Into infant Peter Smith’s eyes the rushed nurse has deftly dropped, carefully pulling back each lid to get it all in, not 1-percent silver-nitrate solution, but 50-percent silver-nitrate solution. Even 5-percent to 25-percent solution is used only on unwanted human tissue — tumors, for instance — because it eats away flesh as effectively as electric cauterizing tools. Fifty-percent solution will gradually bore a hole in a solid piece of wood. And it has already been at work on the soft human tissue of infant Peter’s eyes for two hours.
Dr. John G. Grimley is the first physician to hear the nurse’s shrill cries. Looking at the badly burnt face and the bottle label, the suddenly ashen-faced doctor can only shake his head helplessly. A few minutes later he is reporting to an anguished Mother Teresa Bacigalupo, Superior of the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart who own and run Columbus Hospital, that the nurse has accidentally destroyed a newborn’s sight.
Desperately, the deadly bottle in hand, Mae meanwhile runs to find Dr. Paul W. Casson. But Casson cannot help the baby either. In fact the second doctor to see the infant will later recall that the sight of the tiny charred face and the 50-percent label knocks him speechless and breathless — at a loss for what to do. It is obvious to his experienced eye that the deadly solution has penetrated every layer of facial skin. And by now in those eye sockets there can be nothing left to treat. All Casson can do is put in a call that Dr. Michael J. Horan, who delivered Margaret Smith of a “perfect son” less than three hours ago, should return immediately to the hospital.
As he is telephoning, Mother Bacigalupo scurries anxiously into the nursery, interrupting him to plead he do something to save the baby’s sight. Casson can only explain no human remedy can restore destroyed tissue. “Nothing short of a miracle,” he ends, “can help this kid.”
Her whole body bowed with sorrow, the nun says resolutely in Italian-accented English, “Then we will pray.”
“God! Do!” the doctor urges, his face as stricken as her own. When Dr. Horan arrives, Casson meets him in the hall and tries to break it gently, saying only that “a slightly stronger solution of silver nitrate” has been used for the Smith infant’s eyes.
Dr. Horan exclaims at once, “Anything stronger than 1-percent solution and that’s a blind baby.” A minute later as he bends over the crib, the eyes which are now beginning to exude pus like the nose are so swollen he cannot open them. Three doctors have already seen the baby, and except for ordering cold compresses to reduce inflammation, they can do nothing for him. Horan sends for an eye specialist and waits, a nervous wreck, Casson notes. The eye specialist Dr. Kearney’s expertise merely confirms the other men’s medical knowledge of the properties of nitrate. As if the situation cannot be worse, Horan bears the additional burden of knowing Mrs. Smith’s first baby, a girl, lived only five days. How to tell her and her husband that if their second baby lives, he will be totally blind? He will also be terribly disfigured, since, when a burn goes through all the layers of skin, the body cannot repair itself with new skin, but only with scar tissue.
That afternoon and evening as the spiritual daughters of Frances Cabrini, foundress of the hospital and their religious order, go off duty, they gather one by one in the chapel. All the long night they remain there begging Mother Cabrini, dead only three years, to obtain from the bountiful heart of Jesus the healing of the Smiths’ whimpering infant. Mae is with them, praying her heart out too.
At nine o’clock the next morning, when Kearney and Horan arrive at the nursery, to their astonishment they find baby Peter’s eyelids much less swollen and pussy. Gently the eye specialist opens the eyelids, his stomach tightening as he prepares to see the ravages on the delicate eye tissue of the deadly acid.
Instead, looking back at him with the vague, slightly unfocused gaze of the one-day-old are two perfect eyes.
Kearney and Horan are staggered, as are Casson and Grimley when they arrive. Mae, who shudders to recall how she held back the ba-by’s eyelids to make sure the drops went in, can only sob with delirious gratitude.
Amid the smiles and backslappings someone points out something else inexplicable: the horribly charred skin is healing to smooth infant satin, instead of blistering and contracting.
But no smiles are so broad as the nuns’. They knew Mother Cabrini’s sanctity personally. Now that she has proven it they exult. Her prayers have obtained this “impossible” cure from the Lord.
Then another tragedy looms. Almost immediately after the miracle, the baby comes down with pneumonia. His jubilant doctors plunge back into fear once more, for infant Peter’s temperature, in this pre-antibiotic era, is so high at 107, it appears he will die. This time the summoned Mother Bacigalupo practically laughs at the anxious doctors as she says, “Mother Cabrini did not restore his vision for him to die of pneumonia.” But again the Sisters spend the night in prayer. By morning, another miracle: fever down, pneumonia gone.
In 1938 Mother Cabrini is beatified by the Catholic Church, Several miracles are cited as signs from God in favor of this step, one being the healing of Peter Smith. Seventeen years old, he attends the ceremonies in St. Peter’s, Rome, where onlookers notice his striking and expressive eyes that need no glasses and his smooth-skinned face. Only those who know to look carefully for them make out the two tiny scars where deadly nitrate solution once burned a furrow down his cheeks.
All the way to his death in 2002, Fr. Peter Smith will love to talk about Mother Cabrini, whose prayers to God when he was an infant, as he put it, “show the age of miracles has not passed.”
The Miracle of Fulton J. Sheen
God has friends in places little connected with Him in the public mind.Would you believe an American proposed for official sainthood whose prime time television show brought him an emmy — for talking about God yet?
TV star Fulton John Sheen’s heroic virtue was recognized with the title Venerable in June 2012. You know well by now that it is God’s approval through a miracle that permits a beatification. In this Cause miracles seem in good supply. So beatification could come soon. When it does Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen may have the distinction of ending up with not just one shrine but two.
Not only a widely read author, the native of El Paso, Illinois, was famous for Life Is Worth Living, his television show seen by millions when there were only three networks (ABC, NBC, and CBS) in the United States and the whole country seemed to park itself before “the tube” nightly. Although one of television’s biggest stars, full of personal charisma, with a sense of the dramatic that could make viewers weep, as well as wit and a sense of comedy that evoked bubbles of laughter, Sheen was also revered among those, like Apostoli, who looked past the show for his spiritual attributes: primarily his deep love of Christ exemplified, among other ways, by his unfailingly spending an hour a day — he called it a Holy Hour — in prayer before the eucharistic Christ. Apostoli says that when he saw Sheen, he wanted to be like him — not the celebrity aspect but “the man of God.”
It was Billy Graham — no slouch himself at communicating Christ — who said, “Sheen was the greatest communicator of the twentieth century.” Looking at Sheen’s background, this is surprising. When he started his educational path to the priesthood, the successful business-man’s son’s potential for scholarship, not for communicating to huge groups of ordinary people, was what drew attention. Sent to be educated at some of the world’s foremost schools, the University of Louvain in Belgium, the Sorbonne in Paris, and the Angelicum in Rome, he was the first American at Louvain to win the prestigious Cardinal Mercier Prize for International Philosophy.
He came back to America and, after three years in his home diocese, began to teach theology and philosophy at Washington DC’s Catholic University as an educationally sophisticated intellectual of proven brilliance. Yet he would become known for the ability — often by coining witty and pithy sayings — “to explain spirituality and the Catholic faith in ways that everyone could understand.” And he did it first on radio — so it wasn’t his striking good looks that had people hanging on his words. That was as early as 1930, when he began a Sunday-night broadcast called The Catholic Hour. Sponsored by the Church, for twenty years he taught Catholicism that way. From 1951 he “starred” on television.
On TV he taught Life and why it is worth living — a subject which led to God through every topic imaginable. In that anti-Catholic era, 1951 to 1957, there he was before millions, mostly non-Catholics, in full — some would say exaggerated — Catholic regalia: black clerical garb, a large crucifix on his chest, and a big magenta cape flowing behind him. In down-to-earth, humorous talks about life’s basics, aimed at people of every faith or none, his soft-sell approach won friends for Christ and the Church, his converts too many to detail.
Twenty-four years after his death and burial at St. Patrick’s Cathedral as a bishop of New York, his Cause was opened in September 2003 by the Peoria Diocese.
Already in the summer of 2006, when the Cause for this Servant of God was only open three years, there were two cures of a magnitude to potentially qualify as official miracles — and definitely, in any case, worth sending to Rome. Following ceremonies in Peoria and in Pittsburgh, for each of the healings respectively, the Cause’s Rome-based postulator, Andréa Ambrosi, present at both, hand carried them to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints.
The first healing recipient was Therese Kearney of Champaign, Illinois, then in her early seventies. During a surgery in 1999, Mrs. Kearney suffered a tear in her pulmonary artery. Told his wife would probably not make it, Frank Kearney, a long-time admirer of the media star priest, sought Sheen’s prayer intercession. (Sheen at this time had been dead twenty years.) His wife lived, and this was considered something beyond what medicine could have done. The couple died in 2006, seven years later, he in February and she, at age 79, in September. But the healing had already survived the diocesan-level vetting. Details of her cure — over five hundred pages of medical data and testimonies by the witnesses, who included the doctors involved, a nurse, a priest, and family members — had been assembled under Msgr. Richard Soseman, as delegate of the bishop of Peoria. Packed and sealed in a witnessed ceremony, just five days after Therese Kearney’s death, the records were officially turned over to the postulator for transport to Rome.
Postulator Ambrosi made a second stop for similar ceremonies in Pittsburgh. There he picked up a thousand pages of meticulous testimony and medical records on the cure of a seriously ill infant boy whose family belong to the Ukrainian Diocese of St. Josaphat in Parma, Ohio. The Catholic Ukrainian diocese is small and without either the personnel or financial resources to conduct the necessary investigation of a cure. The Pittsburgh diocese took over for them. While details of the infant’s cure were withheld, Fr. Ambrosi said only that the baby was “gravely ill” when his parents sought Archbishop Sheen’s prayer intercession. Vice-postulator Fr. Andrew Apostoli has said the infant had three life-threatening conditions, one of which was the worst form of sepsis. The fact of this being a cure from God, not from medical means, was supported by the main doctors involved in the case. “All of them,” Ambrosi concluded, “recognized that a force superior to their medical science intervened for his [the infant’s] recovery.”
About four years later, in 2010, another infant is also said to have received a miracle, this one in Peoria. The facts actually made public, with the cooperation of the family, when Sheen was named Venerable in 2012 show the devotion Sheen can inspire.
Bonnie Engstrom and her family live in a small central-Illinois town not that far from El Paso, Illinois, the little town where Sheen was born. Bonnie had a special feeling for then Servant of God Sheen, she explains, precisely because he was “born in this small insignificant town, El Paso, followed God’s will in his life, and became a great instrument of the Lord.” To Bonnie, this showed “it doesn’t matter where you’re from.” She and her husband, Travis, agreed that the child of her current pregnancy would be James Fulton, the middle name honoring Sheen. Throughout this pregnancy, as she went about her daily chores as wife and mother, Bonnie also sought the prayer support of the dead TV-star evangelist.
But during James Fulton’s birth at the family home that September (2010), Fulton Sheen did not actually seem to be proving much of a friend: a previously undetected knot in the umbilical cord became so tight during delivery that the baby was born blue, without pulse or breath. Mother and the stillborn baby were rushed by ambulance to St. Francis Medical Center in Peoria.
Engstrom remembers chanting Fulton Sheen’s name over and over as a team of doctors and nurses worked on the baby. It seemed fruitless, and the ER group prepared to pronounce the Engstrom infant dead when suddenly his heart began to beat.
Today, apparently no worse for his harrowing birth because he is developing normally, James — along with his mother — is now a kind of star himself since mother and child are playing a role in their heavenly friend’s ascent to official sainthood. On the other hand, the small-town tyke is also, to his family’s joy, just like his older siblings.
As for Bonnie Engstrom, she finds her faith affirmed that God does work miracles. “Every milestone [in development] he has crossed was a milestone we thought he wouldn’t achieve,” she says with a kind of awe. The miracle of her stillborn baby’s not only returning to life but being undamaged has touched her in other ways too. One is that the mother of what today is considered a large family appreciates her vocation “a lot more.” She says when she sees her children do something, such as James, who should be dead, shaking toys at her, trying to be cute, she is able “to appreciate all those little moments more.”
Time will tell which of the cures being studied in Rome, this one, the two others, or one yet to come, proves the beatification miracle. There are other cures not chosen for Rome, apparently. Vice-postulator Fr. Andrew Apostoli notes that an extraordinary number of cases where people report the archbishop’s intercession involve infants.
MULTIPLICATION MIRACLES:
Although the multiplication of food in the Gospels is well known, it is a lesser known mystery that many Catholic saints were able to produce similar miracles.
It was not only in the New Testament, but the Old, wherein food was multiplied by God to sustain His chosen ones.
(Note By Blogger: The contents of this particular series is NOT intended to convince ANYONE to become a Catholic it is ONLY meant to show a few of the more extreme miracles that are among the things that God has done through out the centuries and even in the modern era, that being said I believe that God wants to enable us ALL to bring Heaven to Earth which is why Yeshua taught us to pray "Our Father Who art in Heaven, Hallowed be THY name THY Kingdom come THY will be done, ON EARTH AS IT IS IN HEAVEN , give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for the kingdom, the power and the glory are YOURS now and forever, amen. (Or you could have said for THINE is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever amen. Either option IS valid). One More thing I should say is that the ONLY difference between a redeemed person in Heaven and those of us here on Earth is where you are (That Is IF you have received salvation which is ONLY through Yeshua/Iesous/Jesus AND have given the Holy Spirit an open invitation to do the miraculous through you and with you).
The Prophet Elias, when directed to stay and live with a a widow and her son who were near out of food, not only healed her son of a sickness which would have been unto death, but the little food they had multiplied for months until the draught passed, sparing the Prophet Elias and the family, as well.
St. Isidore the Farmer 1130
St. Isidore was born and raised a poor boy and developed compassion for not only humankind but for creatures.
A report was made that one day while bringing a sack of corn from the fields to be ground, he noticed a large migration of birds which were obviously starving and hungry. In the presence of many witnesses, he poured out half of the sack of corn for the birds while shocked onlookers observed the bag continuing to refill itself.
When the bag arrived at the farm to be ground, witnesses said that it produced twice the flour of a usual bag of corn.
St. Benedict 543
St. Benedict was known for his charity to the poor and always gave from the store of food saved for the monks to the poor people who came to their doors.
When asked what the monks would do if they ran out, which they had come close to on occasion, St. Benedict made reply, “Divine Providence intends to supply the needs not only of the monks but also of the guests and the many poor who daily knock at the door of the monastery.”
Only five loaves of bread remained, St. Benedict’s generosity had exhausted their supplies, but the saint continued to insist that the community have faith in the providence of God.
It is written that he spoke to the monks, “Why are you saddened at the lack of a little bread? Why do you not rather put greater trust in God? He treats us according to the measure of our faith. Today your faith is small and bread scarce. But console yourself; tomorrow you shall have in abundance.”
Two hundred sacks of flour appeared on the doorsteps of the monastery the following morning. After the monks searched and searched the countryside and the town for whom it could have come from, they realized that no one had given it. They remembered the words of St. Benedict and realized God had provided it Himself.
Several sacks were kept as relics of this miracle, but were later burned in a fire.
Others Known to have Multiplied Food
Others who were also known to have Multiplied Food included St. Dominic, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Elizabeth of Hungary, St. Catherine of Siena, St. Francis of Rome, St. Colette, St. Gerard Majella, St. Francis of Paola, St. Teresa of Avila, St. Mary Magdalene De’Pazzi, St. Rose of Lima, St. Francis Regis, St. Jean Marie Baptiste Vianney, St. Andrew Hubert Fournet, St. Zita, St. Joseph Benedict Cottolengo, St. John Bosco, Blessed Anna Maria Taigi, St. Philip Benizi, Bl;essed Alvarez of Cordova, St. John Cantius, St. Paul of the Cross, Blessed John Liccio, St. Rita of Cascia and Blessed Peter of Tiferno.
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